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 […]

Alps minimum target grades are aspirational; in order to achieve them students need to match the performance of students in the top 25% of providers nationally. The full national dataset at AS/A level and BTEC is used to identify the results being achieved by students of differing prior attainment in the top 25% of schools […]

One of the most important elements for any successful organisation is forward planning. In educational terms, this means looking towards the next academic cycle – while still striving towards excellence in the current one. Schools and colleges who use Alps find that our system follows this academic cycle closely, with key points in the year […]

Firstly, as ‘Progress’ is now the key performance table measure post-16 as well as in KS4 the L3VA is clearly a document that your Head does need to understand! However, let’s not get fooled into thinking that the purpose of the L3VA is to facilitate school / sixth form improvement. As even the unvalidated version […]