Top tips for effectively tracking student progress, identifying priorities and driving improvement

In this blog:

• The importance of effectively tracking student progress
• Making the most of assessment data and monitoring points
• Evaluating outcomes and identifying priorities
• Maximising the impact of your analysis – getting the data right
• Planning interventions – the importance of student-level analysis
• Additional resources available from Alps – including a FREE Alps Checklist for senior, subject and pastoral leaders and subject teachers

Effective tracking and monitoring of student progress is key to raising student achievement. It enables leaders and teachers to evaluate the quality of teaching and learning, identify any gaps in student understanding and plan intervention strategies to address underachievement.

During the autumn term, most schools and colleges will be analysing their first sets of monitoring data.

The aim of this blog is to give you some practical tips based on my own experience running a top sixth form for over 10 years, to highlight the importance of your analysis and how this can inform key intervention strategies that you may put in place, to ultimately secure the great outcomes that your students and team deserve.

Tip 1: Assessment Data

A common understanding of the definition of your monitoring grade

When tracking student progress, regular analysis of assessment data and how this compares to target grades is key. You will have your own tracking systems, but in this blog I will refer to the one I loved, which was Alps Connect.

Firstly, you need a system that allows you to upload unlimited in-year monitoring data, based on the grade set that you and your team agree to use, for example current working at grades, predicted grades (based on work completed so far) or mock assessment data.

The type of grade will influence how you view the value-added analysis. If you are to make meaningful school/college improvement decisions, it is essential that all teaching staff are clear on your expectations on how they arrive at the assessment grade for each student, so that you are comparing like with like across your classes and departments.

I have met many colleagues in schools and colleges across the UK in my work as an Alps Consultant, who have not been clear on the definition of their ‘monitoring grade’. This can significantly hinder your ability to accurately identify the core students for intervention, sometimes focusing on students that are actually doing OK but looked in need of additional support, and taking time away from those more in need, who looked on track only because they were given a different type of predicted grade.

When planning a series of data capture points, it is important to work closely with both subject and pastoral leaders to ensure that the type of assessment data collected is consistent across different subjects and year groups to enable effective comparisons and analysis.

“Having a whole staff meeting to re-confirm our definition each year before the first assessment point, was essential and invaluable in our school.” – Dr John Roe, Alps Education Consultant

So, how many monitoring points do you need?

Careful consideration also needs to take place over the timing and frequency of your data capture points to ensure that they provide a meaningful insight into student progress.

It is important to plan in sufficient time between your data capture points for thorough analysis, feedback and interventions to take place. If there are too many data capture points it can create unnecessary pressure for both staff and students, while infrequent collection can lead to delays in student interventions taking place.

During my time as a school leader, I found that having around three or four data capture points for each cohort during an academic year worked particularly well.

It gave us sufficient quality data, time to identify trends and gaps in learning and time to support students through constructive feedback and intervention strategies.

Tip 2: Evaluating outcomes and identifying priorities

When tasked with evaluating each monitoring point’s data, I found the key areas of Alps Connect quick and easy to use to give me the holistic and detailed information I needed.

In whatever system you use, I would suggest you need to be able to analyse and evaluate outcomes at a whole school strategic level, at a subject level and at your student level.

You want a system that does the heavy lifting for you and avoids the need for time consuming spreadsheets.

In Connect, it is also easy to track the academic progress of key student groups, e.g. by gender, disadvantaged/non-disadvantaged, EAL and SEND/ALN status, which again, allows great conversations with your department heads and teachers to enable targetted interventions to be planned effectively.

Your monitoring data is in, now what?

Once monitoring gradepoint data had been uploaded into Connect, my starting point as a school leader was to analyse this using the Connect Strategic Analysis section.

This gave me the opportunity to quickly get an overview on the value-added progress of my cohort and specific groups within this.

The Strategic Overview contains the valuable Alps Quality Indicator (QI) score. This is a unique indicator that Alps calculates, which measures the total points amassed by a cohort or chosen student groups for each subject against the total that would be generated if all Alps Minimum Expected Grades (MEGs) were achieved. This score is then ranked against all the other providers in the Alps national dataset benchmark, to generate an Alps grade, enabling schools and colleges to quickly see whether your whole school outcomes are matching the performance of the top 25%, middle 50% or lower 25% of providers in the national benchmark.

Importantly for me, Alps Connect gives the ability to see four gradepoints at a time, so by uploading multiple monitoring gradepoints throughout the year and analysing the change in QI score over time, I was able to quickly compare the progress being made in value-added terms by my whole cohort and key student groups within this.

When working as a school leader, this ability to track the progress of students throughout the academic year and to get instant value-added analysis was a ‘game-changer’ for my school.

Once I had an indication of how my predicted outcomes performed against the Alps national benchmarks, I would look in more detail at the subject and student data.

When using the Subject Analysis and Student Analysis Overview areas in Connect, I was able to quickly explore whether students were making similar progress in all subjects and, by using the comparison tools, I was able to focus on the progress of student groups as well as individual students. From analysing our in-year monitoring data we were able to quickly identify priorities with current cohorts in terms of subjects and student groups.

This process had a real, positive impact on the outcomes of our students, together with our overall progress performance as a school, so that a large proportion of our students, and the school overall, were consistently matching the top 25% against national results, and often exceeding this.

I taught in Wales, but note that providers in England are also able to track their students’ progress against KS4 and KS5 performance measures in Connect, which gives an added dimension and adds to the platform’s power when analysing in-year monitoring data.

Tip 3: Maximising the impact of your analysis – getting the data right

From my experience of using Alps Connect, I would recommend that staff leading monitoring analysis within a school or college work in close partnership with data-managers to ensure that the information uploaded is accurate and that the data you use contains key information that you would like to track against, such as students’ gender, ethnicity, SEND/ALN and disadvantaged/non-disadvantaged status.

Uploading this information will allow you to make the maximum use of your system’s comparison tools and to be able to compare the value-added performance of key student groups.

If your system allows this, including information such as teaching sets and tutor groups in any upload will also enhance the quality of the analysis and support effective tracking and monitoring of student progress. When visiting schools each year, although a minority, I am surprised at how many do not upload this information into their tracking system. In my school, my team and I found this level of additional information was key to focused interventions for our students.

In addition to uploading student information such as gender and ethnicity, it is also possible within the Connect platform to upload custom columns to provide even more bespoke analysis.

When working as a school leader in Wales, I found it particularly useful to set up custom groups to track the progress of students eligible for Educational Maintenance Allowance and those students new to my sixth form.

With attendance being such a key focus, increasingly the schools and colleges I am working with are choosing to create custom groups within Connect to track, monitor and evaluate the value-added outcomes of different attendance cohorts.

After identifying a group of students where poor attendance is significantly impacting on their value-added progress, senior leaders, middle leaders and subject teachers can then target this group through interventions and attendance strategies.

Through analysis of subsequent monitoring and examination gradepoints, providers can then effectively evaluate the impact of both subject and whole-school strategies that have been put in place to improve attendance rates and to address gaps in learning caused by poor attendance.

This is already proving successful in a number of schools with which I work.

Tip 4: Planning interventions – the importance of student level analysis

Connect had a great tool that allowed me to quickly identify the students who were not making the progress I might expect, called the Student Performance Group comparison.

This would break down the cohort into various groups of students which included those who were below target in any or all subjects. Identifying these groups in the system that you use will be particularly useful when coordinating student interventions.

For example, in my school, if a student was underachieving in just one subject, departments would take the lead in informing parents and putting in place appropriate intervention strategies. If underachievement existed in multiple subjects, we felt it more appropriate for pastoral teams to take the lead, communicating with students and parents and working with individual departments and form tutors to develop appropriate strategies.

The Student Analysis Overview area of Connect also allowed me to identify groups of students who were currently meeting or exceeding their targets and I could use this in school reward systems.

Rewarding individual students and form groups who make the most collective progress during a term or half term can lead to increased motivation levels within your cohort. Connect also allowed me to compare progress against both MEGs or personalised targets and, for those who love data, it can be easily exported into Excel for further analysis if needed.

Tip 5: Additional Resources available from Alps

Alps is not only about dry data analysis, we aim to support schools and colleges with their analysis and other aspects of quality assurance, and have produced a range of Alps Champions resources, including a series of free video tutorials for new and existing users who are keen to develop their knowledge, understanding and skills further.

We have also created valuable Staff Checklists for senior, subject and pastoral leaders as well as subject teachers that contain a list of key questions for staff to consider when analysing both in-year monitoring data and examination results.

If you would like a copy of our Checklists, you can use this link.

Finally, all Alps schools and colleges have access to our series of free Champions Webinars led by our experienced team of educational consultants. These webinars, which take place throughout the academic year, support school and college leaders with their analysis and other aspects of quality assurance and improvement planning. Below is a list of our 2024-25 Champions Webinars – they have been incredibly popular so far and we receive outstanding feedback.

I hope that you have found the tips and links in this blog useful and that they help you when evaluating outcomes and tracking student progress.

End note from Alps

We currently work with over 1,200 schools and colleges and 95 Groups and MATS in the UK and internationally, offering our high-quality analysis at both KS4 and KS5.

If you do not use Alps currently and are interested in how Alps could support you to improve your outcomes, do not hesitate to contact one of our friendly team. You can also call us on 01484 887600 and we will be delighted to speak to you, or you can book a demo at a time convenient for you with one of our knowledgeable team.

About the author John Roe, Educational Consultant for Alps

John has worked in education for 22 years as a science teacher, Head of Department and Pastoral Lead. John is passionate about creating an aspirational culture and supporting students to achieve their full potential. Prior to joining Alps, John was Director of Radyr Sixth Form in Cardiff for 10 years, where he lead the transformation of the sixth form with student outcomes consistently matching the performance of the top 2% nationally.