Reaching your targets and improving school performance is key to your school’s sustained growth. Ultimately, the better your performance, the better your brand image, which puts places at your school at a higher demand.
There are a number of reasons that a parent might choose a school, including location, extra-curricular activities, and more. But proving your school’s ability to maximise their child’s academic performance might make the difference between an application, or them choosing another establishment.
However, it’s important to note that understanding school performance doesn’t just benefit parents and students, but is also key to the successful operation of your finance teams, administration teams and school leadership.
A full analysis of your school allows leaders to make smarter decisions based on real insights. So, how do you know what information you need and how do you extract the right data?
- Harness your school data
- Find the right software tools
- Contextualise data points
- Generate actionable insights for leadership teams
Harness your school data
Schools manage large amounts of data on a daily basis, without even acknowledging it. Software systems operate so seamlessly in modern schools that it can be easy to forget the vast amount of data points at our fingertips.
Analysing school performance allows you to harness that available data and really maximise its performance for your school, beyond supporting the school’s daily operations. But what are the real-life benefits to understanding your data?
- Improve student outcomes: Student happiness and performance are the main priority for your school. Your data can help you to track and monitor attendance, academic performance, behaviour, safeguarding at your school, and more, on both a macro and micro level. Drive better outcomes for your students by understanding your strengths and weaknesses.
- Benchmark your school: How is your school really performing compared to your competitors? A positive brand image and supportive alumni are great assets, but your data can really dig down into the details and highlight where you can make active improvements. Position your school among your competition to really understand how both parents and industry leaders view your school.
- Real-time data: In order to be truly beneficial, your analytics need to reflect the most up to date information. Your data managers and school leaders need to understand how your school is performing now, not months prior. With real-time data, you can make data-backed decisions for your school today, to improve outcomes tomorrow.
- Improved forecasting accuracy: Know that your performance forecasts are backed by the latest available data for more reflective predictions, allowing you to make smarter, more informed decisions for the future growth of your school.
Find the right software tools
The key to effective data analytics is having the right tools to manage your data stores. Keeping your data clean and regularly up to date can be the difference between truly actionable data insights and out of date recommendations.
Your MIS is critical to your data management and, therefore, to your data analytics. Ultimately, your MIS data is what forms the basis of your data analytics and is a key foundation for your future growth plans. Your MIS needs to seamlessly integrate with your other school software and ensure that all system data is clean and usable. Without clean data, your data managers cannot generate effective and meaningful reports for leadership.
However, your MIS cannot generate detailed reports for all purposes. Schools need a solution that harnesses the data within the MIS and understands where the key data points lie. Data analytics and visualisation technologies, like Microsoft’s Power BI, are what really transform your data into palatable information about your school.
iSAMS Central is a powerful reporting and data analytics tool for independent schools. Central easily integrates with your existing iSAMS MIS, or any MIS, and harnesses your stores of data, turning school information into actionable, data-backed insights. Central uses Power BI to provide you with visualisations that simplify and thereby make the most out of your MIS data. Working in tandem, Central and your MIS supply all the tools and information you need to drive and sustain your school growth.
Contextualise data points
Your school’s internal MIS data is critical for analysing your school performance. However, sometimes you need additional information in order to understand the true relevance of data. For example, if a high-street store’s sales are down one day of the week, it might be interesting to note that it rained on that same day.
Similarly, your school data can benefit from additional context too, especially when managing data relating to students or staff attendance.
It’s important to note that your school performance relies on people, and people can rarely be predicted using data sets alone. Context is key to understanding daily factors that fall outside of the control of school leadership.
iSAMS Central combines school data with contextual, external data. There are a number of factors that can affect your school, including the weather and holiday or term dates. Your data insights need to be based in the real world, and Central helps you to truly translate your data and your school performance.
Generate actionable insights for leadership teams
iSAMS Central was made to boost your data management teams and provide palatable insights into school performance for leadership teams and decision-makers. Schools manage a vast amount of data on a daily basis, and it’s important to get the most out of that data. Your MIS could hold the information you need to achieve substantial growth goals.
Central uses data visualisation and analytics technology to generate inbuilt dashboards for a variety of important data points. Tweak them according to your individual needs and showcase the performance that is truly key to your individual school. With iSAMS, find key data points including:
- Admissions: Offering a suite of inbuilt admissions reports, live admissions statistics are available in an instant. Simply enter the date range you’re interested in at the top of our tailored reports, and Central will create the visualisations that you need – providing a comprehensive overview of your enquiries. You can drill down into any individual report to see the key data points within.
- Current student data: The Current Student reports allow you to view all of your key student statistics at a glance. Analyse key student numbers and attributes, and then delve further into those figures to really understand the insights behind your performance.
- Attendance: Central offers a range of inbuilt attendance reports, allowing you to track attendance across your school. Spot key trends using the data visualisations provided by Central and, as you’d expect from iSAMS, drill into individual reports to find the data points and key numbers.
- Student behaviour and wellbeing: Keep your finger on the pulse of your student body with reports and live information on Wellbeing Concerns, Rewards & Conduct, Detentions, and more. Track points, positive and negative reward allocation, and compare throughout the week or year.
Tweaking the existing reports is quick and straightforward with our iSAMS Central Designer, too. Simply chop and change your visualisations, swap and drag-and-drop filters and data points, and efficiently create your own custom dashboards.
Decide which staff members have access to which reports and data, so stakeholders across your departments can access comprehensive, relevant, tailored dashboards at the click of a button.
This data can also be used to more accurately forecast future growth and performance, allowing you to make informed changes to your action plans moving forward.
iSAMS Central aims to put your school’s data story in the hands of those that drive the school forward. Make smarter decisions thanks to your MIS data and Central’s powerful data analytics. The effortless integration with iSAMS holds the key to harnessing your data for improved school outcomes.
If you’d like to learn more about iSAMS Central, you can watch a demo below.