Brent Knoll, a special school with around 150 pupils, needed a tracking system to enable them to monitor their pupils’ personal development over time. We worked closely with them to build a framework for tracking six key areas of development in our SS Tracker:

1. Social communication
2. Social interaction
3. Sensory processing
4. Emotional understanding
5. Independence and organisation
6. Self-care and keeping safe

We then ran an interactive workshop (pictured below) to ensure all teachers, practitioners and administrators understood the new assessment framework and how to use the SS Tracker tools and analysis. The workshop also helped establish a common vocabulary for progress tracking. Importantly, the workshop was a brilliant way to hear feedback from staff and subsequently make adjustments to ensure buy-in across the school for the new assessment framework.

Teachers and practitioners in the school now create baseline and termly assessments on the SS Tracker for each pupil, scoring them against six key statements within each category. Our interactive analysis workbook then provides several visualisations of the assessment data to help the school to understand pupil’s current level and progress made in order to draw useful insights.

As well as tracking an individual pupil’s progress, the analysis workbook allows the school to explore the progress of particular pupil groups (for example, those on pupil premium) or those in a specific intervention group.

Brent Knoll use this analysis to produce personal development tracker reports (screenshots shown top right), which highlight important differences between pupil groups, the level of progress made across key stages and identify specific areas of strength and weakness. They also use the analysis to help teachers identify the pupils in need of additional support and to ensure appropriate targets are set.