Parents assess a great deal of factors when considering the right school for their children. From location, facilities, curriculum, extra-curricular activities, and more, there are many ways that you can enhance your school to win parents over.
However, ultimately parents choose a school based on its ability to enhance the development and growth potential of their child for their future.
Your school needs to be performing at its maximum in order to get the most out of staff, resources and, as a result, students. Benchmarking is a great first step into driving growth and performance for your school. You need to know where you’re starting from at the beginning of your growth trajectory.
Benchmarking enables you to get a full understanding of the market you occupy, as well as the other schools within it, and how your school fits into that market. So, what is benchmarking for independent schools, and how do you use your data to identify how well your school is performing?
In its simplest form, benchmarking does what it says on the tin. Benchmarking is comparing yourself against a benchmark or standard. Typically, performance is measured against external criteria, such as the performance of the market that your business occupies – for example.
For schools, there are a variety of areas that you might look to benchmark. It’s important to analyse performance in order to get a better understanding of external market performance and how your school measures up to expectations.
You might look to measure your school against the best in the space, or an industry average – depending on your individual goals. Benchmark categories might include:
Your school data is the key to effectively benchmarking your school. Your MIS contains data on individual students, their performance, their wellbeing, attendance data and more. Clean and secure data stores are the first step to benchmarking for schools.
As a school, your primary focus is to provide students with the best education and school experience possible. Your students will always be the priority. But your students aren’t the only ones that benefit from school benchmarking. Analysing and contextualising school performance is key to sustained growth for your entire school community, including internal departments and leadership teams.
You’ve decided to work on benchmarking your school and truly analysing school-wide performance – but where do you start?
The benchmarking process will be different for each individual school depending on your available data and your goals, but there are some key steps to every detailed school analysis:
Let your software assist in your benchmarking process by providing you with clean and usable school data and powerful data analytics. The iSAMS MIS and our school reporting solution, iSAMS Central, work in tandem to help you understand what your data is trying to tell you and unlock your school’s full data story. Use the Central data analytics technology to identify your school trends, then use that information to benchmark against others in the industry.
However, it’s also important to remember that benchmarking is half the journey towards school development and growth. Your benchmark process needs to be the foundation that allows you to create actionable insights and plans as the next step. Ultimately, your data is important because it empowers your decision making.
iSAMS Central was built to provide you with all the data that you need to make smarter decisions for your school in a palatable format for all school departments. Power BI, API, and data visualisation technology make harnessing your data as efficient and seamless as possible. Unlock trends in attendance, admissions, wellbeing, behaviour, and more.
Interested in learning more about Central? You can watch a full demo below.