The recent budget by George Osborne contained a number of initiatives that will impact on schools and the millions of children that attend them every day.

Although announced this week they are a continuation of policies that have previously being trialled or enacted at various levels of the education system.

We have recently blogged about the biggest change unveiled during the budget, which was the conversion of all UK schools to academies by 2022. However, there were also announcements around the length of the school day, after school activities and the so called “sugar tax” that have also dominated the post budget discussions.

Although the sugar tax is not strictly an education issue, it is an important one. The tax is expected to raise £1.2bn in the first two years after it is enacted. The mechanics of which are not only designed to help tackle childhood obesity, but also raise revenue that will be used for education initiatives.

These include £285m per year to spend on the extended day program for secondary schools; £320m to double the primary school PE premium and £10m to provide 1,600 schools with breakfast clubs.

Extended School Days

The extended school days’ program will be used to fund extracurricular activities focused around sports and the arts. These sessions will extend the school day for many students by more than an hour and is based on research that such activities improve student achievement.

The proposal has been met with enthusiasm by Russell Hobby, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, he said:

“Any expansion of hours must be properly funded, as school budgets are extremely tight. As long as this remains at the discretion of schools to meet the needs of their pupils, then it seems positive.”

“The idea that most schools shut at 3.30pm is itself pretty outdated, but we have no problem with extra money to help them in the activities they offer.”

The UK education system and the way that students progress is assessed tracked and reported is one of the most politically sensitive topics in education.

This is because the way in which students are tracked and measured affects the way that students are taught and how the success of the education system and schools themselves is evaluated.

The last decade has seen renewed focus on the way in which pupil progress is assessed and reported. School tables may have been axed but within the education system teachers have had to adapt to a constantly evolving landscape.

What Fuels Changes In Assessment and Reporting Systems?

Change can be triggered by internal factors such as union or teacher feedback or external triggers such as changes in the political make up of the country or governmental education department.

One of the most recent changes to be announced was the introduction of baseline assessments for primary school children. The aim being to measure where a child is when they enter education and how that compares to progress made by the time they leave.

This change has not been universally popular and has recently been criticised by the media, by MPs and teachers groups. However, regardless of what the current system is, it is important to have the right mechanisms in place to assess, track and report student progress.

The Importance Of Flexibility

One of the advantages that users of the School Reporting Suite have found is that our proprietary software has the ability to adapt to changes in legislation and the national curriculum as well as the bespoke faith curriculums that our software can easily accommodate.

If you would like to know more about how our systems can make the compliance to current reporting standards within your school easier then contact the School Reporting System team for an informal discussion.

The UK school system is huge, with more than 8 million school pupils across 24,000 schools.

These schools cut across all different elements of society, and incorporates the diverse cultural backgrounds from which these children come. It is this diversity that means that there are more than a million children in UK schools that speak 311 different languages and dialects.

This creates a language challenge within the education system. Depending on the demographics of different areas, this can be either a small challenge or a huge one.

In some schools English may not be the first language of a majority of pupils. This fact means that the education system has to be adaptive to the needs of schools in different areas.

Official statistics reveal there are classrooms in which the majority language is not English, but is Polish, Bengali, Somali, Gujarati, Arabic, Tamil and the Afghan language Pashto.

Overcoming this challenge is one that requires identifying the right needs and assigning the right resources quickly and efficiently to where they are needed.

Teaching In Languages Other Than English

Another language factor can be when the administration or reporting of the school is carried out in more than one language. This can be a factor for faith schools, where the core language used in the religion is not English.

These languages can be in different alphabets, and formatted in a different way to English. This creates a challenge to administration; tracking and reporting may be required in multiple languages, particularly if parents do not speak English as a first language.

This is something we have experience in facilitating through our School Reporting System. We have designed our system with language and curriculum needs of different school systems in mind.

This allows our software to be produced in a number of different languages; this flexibility has proven hugely beneficial when working with faith schools.

In 2014 the government commissioned a “Teacher Workload Survey” to identify the workload challenges being faced by teachers.

The Workload Challenge consultation ran between 22 October and 21 November 2014. It was an online survey that was advertised on the Times Educational Supplement (TES) website, and also disseminated via the Department for Education and union websites, newsletters, and social media.

The scope of the survey was for teachers to provide their feedback on what they perceived to be the ‘unnecessary and unproductive’ tasks that they were required to carry out.”

The survey was centred on three open ended questions relating to:

• Unnecessary and unproductive tasks and where they come from
• Solutions and strategies within schools for tackling workload and what works well
• What the government could do to tackle unnecessary workload.

The survey got more than 40,000 responses, and it provides interesting insights into the challenges faced by teachers.

It uncovered that as well as tasks that were unnecessary or unproductive, among those that were necessary the level of detail, duplication or bureaucracy could have a negative impact on teacher workload.

Although not every response was fully reported due to the number of responses and the style of the survey, a number of different factors affecting workload were identified amongst the results analysed:

• The volume of work compared to the time available (particularly for marking)
• Unrealistic deadlines
• Long or irrelevant meetings
• Too many sources of information to manage/monitor
• Lack of ICT training or equipment
• Lack of clarity

The most frequently mentioned tasks contributing to unnecessary and unproductive workload fitted within the category of lesson planning and policies, assessment and reporting administration (82% of respondents mentioned tasks which fitted into this category).

This shows that any steps made to make these processes more efficient can have a positive impact upon teacher workloads.

In the modern education environment formal assessments, paperwork, and marking are an increasingly large part of the teaching workload.

The government has identified three of the biggest areas that lead to unnecessary workload:

1. Marking
2. Planning
3. Data Management

In 2014 the UK government launched the “workload challenge”, designed to ask teachers on their views on how to reduce unnecessary workload. It found that:

• excessive levels of recording detail made tasks burdensome
• Duplication adds to the workload burden
• Bureaucracy was a challenge

With teachers already working long hours and having to adapt to a continuously changing education landscape, any ways of reducing this burden can have a significant impact on morale and results, by giving teachers more time to focus on teaching.

Providing the right tools are used, and that they are implemented with the right strategy, technology can have a significant part to play in reducing the administrative load involved with teaching.

With a need for more visibility and accurate information in real time, schools are looking at how technology can help minimise unnecessary workload.

Technology & The Teacher Workload Challenge

IT software can help overcome this obstacle. Workloads can be reduced by making pupil data easier to record, analyse, and report.

Tellingly, the most frequently mentioned tasks contributing to unnecessary and unproductive workload in the teacher workload challenge survey fitted within the category of lesson planning and policies, assessment and reporting administration (82% of respondents mentioned tasks which fitted into this category).

Implementing simple to use systems can tackle two of the three biggest areas of unnecessary workload. Simpler ways of recording pupil assessments save time in marking. Whilst real time, accurate and tailored reporting mean that data can be managed and reported to senior management and parents in a professional and efficient way.

This challenge was the reason that we developed the School Reporting Suite, pupil assessment; tracking and reporting is essential to give teachers, senior management and parents visibility over pupil progress.