The Importance of Developing Data Fluency in Your School or College

22nd October 2024

In this blog:

  • The importance of data fluency in your school or college
  • Data accuracy vs data accessibility in your school
  • Resources included in your Alps subscription
  • Bespoke training packages with Alps’ Education team

The importance of data fluency in your school or college

The school and college leaders that I meet want their students to achieve great outcomes. One key element to achieving top results is the ability to understand your current performance position, so that you can identify both the areas of success, for celebration, or weakness on which to focus. Central to improving performance is the effective use of data.

Within the MAT Assurance Framework, the DfE talks about strong practice, in terms of quality assurance and accountability, being where data is shared widely and informs regular, honest, action focused conversations with schools” and that “at all levels (classroom, subject, phase and school) there is effective use of the full range of available data to identify issues regarding progress and to target interventions effectively.”

This is important across a MAT, and also vital within a school or college, whether or not part of a MAT.

Implicit in the success of your performance improvement strategies is having a high level of data fluency of colleagues within your school or college.

So, what do I mean by “data fluency”?  From my perspective, this relates to the triple A: where a whole organisation ensures that their relevant data is Accurate, Accessible and when using the data, colleagues are able to take effective Action.

Data accuracy vs data accessibility in your school

Whilst the importance of data accuracy is self-explanatory (yet when it comes to Monitoring Accuracy, I note for many schools and colleges that consistent accuracy is a difficult goal to achieve – a blog for another day!), the importance of accessibility can sometimes be overlooked.

Over the last 25 years, I have worked in and with many schools and I regularly saw that a significant barrier to using data to drive improvement was simply that colleagues in key roles did not understand fully the data that had been presented. Critically, this meant they could not take the most effective action based on the data insights given.

As with all areas of staff knowledge and understanding, the development of data fluency needs to be deliberately planned as part of your school or college’s CPD programme. I recognise that these programmes always face a range of competing pressures, which have only increased over recent years, however, I would strongly advocate that training on your internal data for key staff is essential each year.

Resources included in your Alps subscription

At Alps, I am fortunate to work with a team of educational consultants who have previously worked in high performing schools and colleges. Based on our collective experience, we have developed a fantastic range of resources to support colleagues develop both an understanding of the effective use of data and also the Alps platform. Many resources are included within the Alps Subscription, including our popular Champions Webinars and Alps Explorer Videos.

The Champions Webinars provide termly advice and guidance on the most effective use of data, whilst the Alps Explorer videos provide bite-size explanations on the effective use of key parts of the Alps Connect platform. These resources alongside many others we provide are a great way of providing content as part of colleague’s independent CPD.

Bespoke training packages with Alps’ Education team

In addition, we provide further training options. Our bespoke training sessions are flexible, and so can be delivered to whole staff, Department Heads, Senior Leaders and Subject Leaders.

In terms of data fluency, these are a great opportunity to cover the key elements of the Alps methodology, successful strategies for improving learner outcomes and how Alps analysis can be used by all members of staff to effectively monitor progress, to put meaningful interventions in place and track impact with ease.

Over the past few years our team has delivered hundreds of training sessions with outstanding feedback. I am proud that in 2023-24 we had a 100% customer satisfaction rating, with an impressive average session score of 4.8/5 per session.

“Content was fantastic, trainer was brilliant and we all came away very happy and buzzing about using Alps.”

Louise Umbers, Valley Park School

End Note from Alps

If you would like to find out more about Alps or about our training programme for schools, colleges and Groups you can find more information on our website  Alps Training Courses | A range of courses from our educational experts or equally one of our team would be delighted to talk to you, you can contact us at [email protected] or tel: 01484 887600.

About the author: Dr Jevon Hirst, Alps Training Director

Jevon has over 20 years’ experience working in education. Prior to joining Alps in 2020, Jevon has worked in a number of senior leadership roles within schools, with responsibilities for teaching, learning, curriculum, strategic planning, self-evaluation and student achievement. Central to these roles, has been the intelligent use of data to inform school improvement and maximise outcomes for students.

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