CASE STUDY

Acklam Grange School

Jon Tait, Deputy Headteacher

This is his take on Class Charts and how the behaviour management software has helped Acklam Grange reduce fixed term exclusions from 4 per week to 2 in the whole of 6 months.

The staff here think it’s fantastic because it’s a huge time saving bit of software, which obviously is educational and we get to increase the quality and also reduce the time. It’s something we were always looking at.

For us the best part of Class Charts is actually the artificial intelligence that’s in there. So with behaviour score we can input behaviour but because it’s on a seating plan it knows which students are sat next to each other, so it can tell that John and Peter are 85% more likely to get a behaviour point when they’re sat together, whereas when they’re apart, in Science they’re less likely so that’s fantastic.

But also the time saving tools are being able to re-order your seating plans at a click of a button distribute your gifted and talented students, cluster your pupil premium students or re-organise your seating plans in groups based on behaviour scores.

We’re now, from a behaviour point of view actually analysing and recording so much more behaviour together and contextual behaviour than we were before. What I mean by that is that we’re not only saying that John has had a behaviour point in Science but now we’re saying where they are sat in the class, who they’re sat next to, what influence they’re having over somebody, what time it was and the analysis at the back end is so easy and we’re able to generate that bit of information very very easy and we’re able to use it for a really really good use.

It’s helped with behaviour hugely across the school as well and it’s one thing we’ve really used for the last 18 months to really focus our attention on making sure that the behaviour throughout the school is outstanding and it’s been absolutely brilliant to be able to do that.

From an excluders point of view, about eighteen months ago we were about four exclusions a week on average, big school, fourteen hundred students, currently we’re now down to two exclusions so far this year, the whole year. And that is part of not only using Class Charts but the extra work that we’ve been doing but the reason that Class Charts has helped us pupil premium and with the analysis tool has been great. The analysis is fantastic and is so easy to do, with two or three clicks of a button you can get right to the detail of what’s happening in your school, it’s very easy. You can create progress reports and anyone can do that, whether it’s head of faculty or it’s the head of year or it’s a senior leader or if it’s a classroom teacher depending on the permissions you give them, you can really get into the nitty gritty and for us as school leaders we want to make sure that we don’t just have the information but we do something with it and we do something about it and we’re certainly really empowering teachers with the information that we’ve got in Class Charts to do that.