Contrary to my witty cartoon, a data driven school has nothing to do with cars! It is in fact, a school that uses data to drive it’s decision making; with an ultimate aim of improving academic performance because of those data led decisions.
The ‘data’ I am referring to might be performance, behavioural, attendance, social or financial data. All of these sources of data, when properly analysed can be used used to influence key decisions relating to the running of a school. Decisions from the allocation of the yearly budget across different departments, to the distribution of teachers to teaching groups.
Outside of education, you will struggle to find a new business that wouldn’t describe themselves as ‘data driven’. Most educational apps you will be using the classroom will also be collecting lots of data, to improve their functionality and satisfy their clients (your) needs - they are data driven.
It is important to note, being a data driven school doesn’t necessarily mean teachers collecting more data! Infact, as we know, the vast majority of teachers already collect lots data - it is bringing all of that data together and interpreting it correctly that poses the challenge.
You may also find that you are already a data driven school in some guise, but don't have a formal process for managing and tracking your use of data. In this article I will discuss the potential benefits of being data driven and steps you can take to formalise the process of decision making with data.
Becoming data driven requires a shift in culture and working practices - but with these changes come inherent advantages.
As I have mentioned, lots of schools will already be collecting lots of useful data, so the challenge is formalising the data capture so that it can used to draw useful insights!
Being data driven is NOT about collecting as much data as possible and creating pages and pages of tables that show the metric of the hour. Data alone is pretty useless, to get the desired information from data you need the right tools. Having aggregated all of your data a good visualisation is handsdown more useful than your bog standard table, showing students with the odd rag rating.
Remember - start small. Get a question or target in mind that you want to answer or acheive. Think about the data you need to answer or achieve it - and get going. You could do this at a management level, or teacher by teacher. Using data and converting that into useful information can create vital evidence and sway for important decisions.
As always, please get in touch if you want to learn more about using data in schools.
Best,
Mike
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