Standish Community High School

Standish Community High School is located in the large village of Standish in the Metropolitan Borough of Wigan, Greater Manchester. It has 1,250 students, 11 to 16. Marc Heron, Director of Quality Assurance recently took the time to explain why the implementation of our school improvement solution, SchooliP has led to multiple cost savings at the school.

It has efficiently streamlined processes and provides a wealth of good information to inform our strategic planning. Cost savings are mainly in reduced photocopying plus less time spent preparing and distributing materials. Everything being in one place makes performance management a lot easier. There is no longer a need to re-print and re-circulate information for interim or end of year reviews. SchooliP makes processes quicker and a lot more effective.

Marc Heron – Director of Quality Assurance – Standish Community High School

SchooliP offers complete management of the appraisal process. We asked Marc how line-managers save time when carrying out reviews for their staff.

Objectives can be pre-populated with agreed targets in advance. There is no need for department leaders to use departmental meeting time to hand out and complete proformas. Appraisal meetings are so much quicker as objectives are already in there and linked to our School Development Plan, and overall priorities. Now, it only takes 20 minutes to set up and conduct an appraisal review for the year. In the past, it would have taken at least an hour.

Marc complimented SchooliP on how everything is safe and secure as it is located all in one place. There is no concern over paperwork being lost and deadlines are effectively communicated.

There are no physical folders of evidence and no photocopying. Working online makes uploading appraisal evidence easy with the mobile app. We are able to specify the type of evidence that is required which clarifies the whole process. Everyone knows what is needed and nobody is uploading evidence that won’t count.

For the senior leadership team, multiple efficiencies are enjoyed.

Reviews are now completed on time. Previously, it was a nightmare collecting paper copies and emails. These would then have to be checked off against a tick list. Things are now much smoother.

The automatic collation of key information illustrates the power of SchooliP.

The summary page means that I can quickly see if anyone still has an open review meaning I can chase the Heads of Departments for any missing observations. Powerful filter tools allow for so many different reports. To do this manually would be a time-consuming data nightmare. I don’t know how you could get powerful reports effectively without a system that can filter in the way that SchooliP does. Without it, appraisals would be just about the process rather than the data, which is the valuable part. You could spend hours in Microsoft Excel trying to create the charts that SchooliP automatically gives you.

SchooliP offers data integration to all the major MIS providers. Standish Community High School have taken advantage of this service and to conclude our conversation with Mark, we asked where the school would be without our solution.

It is brilliant to have the integrator with our MIS, it saves a lot of time updating staff lists. Without SchooliP, we would be making assumptions of where we are without accurate information. We would be booking CPD in terms of what we thought were our needs rather than actual needs. Leaders would be buried in paperwork and they would have to spend hours attempting to collate similar data.

SchooliP is used in a variety of school environments and our pricing structure is dependent on the number of pupils on roll.