Alps is committed to supporting schools and colleges throughout this difficult period. As senior leaders and teachers consider how to arrive at their judgement grades for Years 11 and 13 students in a fair and robust way, our Education Team offers some advice and guidance on how Connect Interactive might help. Quality Assurance systems You […]

As there will be no Performance Tables based on 2020 outcomes, we want to assure you that we will work with you to ensure that you are able to set young people aspirational minimum expected grades and assess value-added progress against national data to enable further school or college improvement in the years ahead.

At this time of the year you are likely to have a set of mock examination results for your Year 11 and 13 students. There are numerous reasons as to why we schedule mock examinations for our key year groups. Whatever yours are, your teaching staff should have carefully prepared the papers, prepared their students […]

As the Principal of a large Sixth Form College with over 1,200 A Level and vocational students each year, it was important that I understood detail, including the strengths and weaknesses of every aspect of our curriculum, and just as importantly, the outcomes and needs of every ‘group’ of students we served. This would mean […]

For me, the real power of Connect Interactive is the ability to analyse multiple monitoring points throughout the year. Adding monitoring data is simple. Just decide on the type of data you want to analyse, for example you can add current working at grades, teacher predicted grades and mock examination grades, then extract the grades from your MIS and import into Connect Interactive.

Sue Macgregor, Director of Education here at Alps, has had the article below recently featured in a Sixth Form Colleges Association (SFCA) publication discussing the importance of asking the right questions about data analysis and the quality assurance questions that might arise from data analysis.

How might you account for any differences between your Alps VA and the Performance Tables VA (L3VA)? Alps benchmarks progress against the previous year’s DfE national data, so that schools and colleges can obtain their VA analysis when they need it – around Results Day each August. In contrast, the L3VA / Performance Tables use current year’s data, which may account for minor differences between the two analyses.

At this time of the year you will be focusing on key priorities you might establish to raise student progress post mocks. The only way to raise your Progress 8 is to improve student outcomes. Your main focus must be to raise subject outcomes through improving the performance of specific targeted students.

Effective training for governors is part of a strong leadership team, and will make progress meetings run smoother, share the culture of ambition and aspiration, and ensure that Alps is truly embedded across all stakeholders in the school or college.

During training sessions and conferences we are often asked about strategies that really make a difference in improving outcomes for students. Working with many successful schools and colleges gives Alps consultants a unique insight into strategies that consistently deliver outstanding progress. The following questions have been framed to help providers audit and compare their provision […]

The accuracy of teachers’ predicted grades is most important for the student. Unless teachers use their professional judgement to help students understand where they currently are, and more importantly what they need to do to get to where they want to be, students will not be able to fulfil their ambitions in their post 16 […]

Staff are regularly asked to predict grades for students both at KS4 and KS5. Intervention and mid-year school improvement plans are all based around these grades. But how confident are you that the grades predicted by staff are accurate – in fact how do you define ‘accuracy’ in this context? ‘What should the predicted grades […]