Managing the performance of your school is a vital part of efficient school operations and a targeted growth trajectory. You need to understand where your school is performing, where it isn’t, and how you can strengthen all areas of your school to better achieve.
It can be easy to get lost in the day-to-day running of a school, with so much admin to consider, tight deadlines, and a busy school day. Performance management ensures that your school can handle the demands of education, while also staying on track towards your goals.
But how do you know whether you’re driving towards success? You need to understand your school’s current performance and make sure every part of the school community is working towards the same goals.
- What does performance management look like for Independent schools?
- Software to support performance management
- iSAMS supports performance management in Independent schools
What does performance management look like for Independent schools?
While academic results are important for growth, performance extends beyond student achievements for schools. There are a range of departments that contribute to positive outcomes across a school. It’s important to recognise the significance of each when aiming to effectively manage performance in your school.
However, the journey towards truly effective performance management begins with school data and a holistic approach. Work with your school’s data stores and your staff across departments to ensure you’re working towards your goals as a unit, and everyone has full buy-in on enhancing performance school-wide.
Key areas for high impact on performance
Your school’s database is your most exhaustive resource when aiming to support and boost your performance. Better understanding this information will drive your decision making and ensure your choices have the most impact. However, you need to begin by understanding a range of individual areas of school life before building a performance plan. Here are just a few key areas to consider:
Student achievements and wellbeing
Student performance is one of the most obvious performance indicators for your school. It can often be the deciding factor for prospective parents and is ultimately the result of your school’s efforts. Providing the best education possible is the goal for every educator.
Your school’s database will hold the data you need to understand student achievements. But it should also offer information about the general wellbeing and care of your students – which is just as vital. This data could help to better understand limitations in performance and generate action plans to target those specific areas. For example, more efforts on pastoral care or addressing attendance concerns.
Staff wellbeing and performance
Similarly, your staff's performance ultimately impacts your student’s performance. If your teachers aren’t able to offer their best, then your students cannot make the most of their time at school.
Factors like staff attendance, consistency, and behavioural performance can all have an impact on your student body.
This isn’t just the case for teachers, though. Your admin staff, finance teams, support staff, and your entire workforce contribute to the smooth operation of your school. Without them, you cannot focus on your growth goals.
That’s why engaging with your employees and having clear performance indicators is key to full school performance management – bolstered by powerful HR software. Ensure that your workforce is armed with the resources and information they need to drive your school forward.
Admissions sustained growth
While the day-to-day running of your school is ultimately what powers your performance and, therefore, is vital to monitor – your admissions team is your real centre for school growth. Without an efficiently performing admissions team and process, your school registrations could easily lose momentum.
It’s important to have clear growth goals and performance indicators in place for marketing, applications, and registrations. This ensures that the targets for all departments are aligned, including admissions. These should be realistic but consistently monitored for a strong foundation for performance management.
Efficient financial management
Academic performance is just one performance indicator for your school. This is important for your reputation and thereby your growth, but there is more to school achievement than your student’s efforts. Ultimately, efficient school operations empower your learners to perform.
From a business perspective, your financial management is one of the most vital components to true school performance. Managing expectations and setting data-backed targets ensures that your finance team are clear on their trajectory and can drive your school’s budget forward.
The importance of school data
Ultimately, you cannot understand the current state of your school's performance, including the above components, without your school’s extensive data stores. Each data point is vital to improved performance management.
Begin with a thorough understanding of your current position in all key areas for your school, beyond just the above. From this point, you can begin to build an action plan to improve performance. Your foundational understanding of each area of school life is the primary influencing factor for performance management.
A whole school approach to performance
As mentioned above, your school’s areas for performance may be different from those listed. Each school is different and will have different goals that will drive them forward. One of the most important elements of optimised performance management is whole school buy-in.
Ensure that all teams, whether teachers, admin, admissions, finance, or leadership, have investment in the potential of a truly powerful performance management and enhancement approach.
Software to support performance management
While your school community is vital to generating and implementing a growth plan, you cannot understand the current capabilities and achievements of your school without software – and the data within.
While there are a range of software options available for any school, including dedicated solutions for finance managers, admissions teams, and more – there are two key systems that every school should consider for their performance management approach:
- School management system: This may seem like stating the obvious, but the potential of the data stored within your school’s management information system cannot be understated and is often underestimated. Every data point – whether student, staff, financial data, and more – is gold dust for performance management and drives powerful decision-making.
- Integrated, Power BI reporting solution: Turn your data points into actionable insights with an intuitive reporting solution, integrated directly with your school data. Power BI processes huge amounts of data and creates reports to better understand performance over time, including student data, staff data, admissions, and more.
iSAMS supports performance management in Independent schools
Understanding your performance, generating data-backed goals, and creating a concerted performance management approach is key to school growth. Ensure you’re providing your students with the best learning experience, as well as driving your school forward, by working with systems that enhance your performance management capabilities.
The iSAMS school management system works in tandem with our powerful reporting solution – Central to provide actionable insights into school performance. Bolster your management approach by harnessing your data and establishing the full picture of your school’s achievements and areas to address.
Interested in learning how iSAMS’ solutions were made to empower Independent schools? Watch a full demo below: