Case Studies
Wycombe High School
i2Q delivers A-Grade pupil report-writing solution for Wycombe High School.
For many teachers, producing end of term reports can be a gruelling and harrowing affair. The prospect of compiling reports for every pupil in every subject in every year, checking and re-checking them before delivering them, neatly bound, to expectant parents, can be frankly daunting. Wycombe High School has implemented a complete report production solution that gives teachers throughout the school immediate on-line access to all reports-in-progress, increasing the speed and accuracy of the process and resulting in improved reports for parents, pupils and staff alike..
Wycombe High School is an all-girl selective grammar school with more than 1300 pupils aged eleven to eighteen. The school is a maths and computing specialist and endeavours to provide its girls with an exciting, vibrant and dynamic education environment. With such a high emphasis on teaching standards, the school is always keen to improve its own operations through strategic use of new technology.
In 2004, one area the school identified as necessary to improve was end of year reporting. Assistant Headteacher, Catharine Darnton, explains, “Producing end of year reports used to be a painful and time-consuming operation. We used Word templates and had to print out a separate page for each pupil in each subject. These were put in boxes and delivered to each form tutor who then had to sort through the reports for each pupil before checking them. If there were any mistakes, they had to go back to the subject teacher via a pigeon hole with no formal tracking procedure. Each tutor ended up with a pile of paper containing reports, exam grades and attendance records for each student, with no quick way of finding a specific report or any sensible way to collate them for comparison or analysis. There had to be a better way, and I was charged with the task of finding one.”
Ms Darnton spent the first year assessing the existing processes. “Each department had its own template for producing reports and these needed to be taken into account in the new system. I looked at several applications that were available and was frankly not impressed by them. The main issue was that they didn’t deal with the administrative requirements of preparing reports. For example, certain data held in our school information management systems, such as exam results and attendance, should be available to download automatically into the reports. This would save the teachers a lot of time and would also significantly increase the accuracy of the reports.”
She continues, “By chance, I came across an advert from i2Q for its i2Reporting application. As soon as I saw what this could do I knew I had found the right application for us. i2Reporting had clearly been developed with the whole process of producing reports from the teachers’ perspective in mind. It automated much of the administration of producing reports by having a clear and easy to use auditing facility. Any teacher with an internet connection and the appropriate security rights, can call up any report on any student and immediately see where it is in the checking and approval process. No more trawling through various boxes to find a report, no more pigeon-holes and no more lost reports.”
Producing the final report is also much easier with i2Reporting. “Once the report is complete and all the audit checks are ticked, it is ready to print. We can control exactly how the finished report will look and how much space is allocated to each subject. At a click of a button the report is sent to a networked printer which collates and binds it into a pristine and impressive document, one for the parent and one for our files,” says Ms Darnton.
i2Report is integrated with the schools MIS system, which allows schools to import into the reports any recorded assessment – such as target and predicted grades, or attendance data – for a student’s progress, so eliminating copy typing and supporting the school workforce remodelling agenda. The integration also allows i2Report to read timetable information for students so the software understands who teachers are when they login. The information is then used to top and tail the report to ensure faster production and better accuracy to the reports.
“One of the most impressive elements of i2Reporting is its ease of use,” says Ms Darnton, adding, “The software is very intuitive and has proven easy for existing and new staff to pick up. Navigating the system using the menus is straightforward and the ability to search needs nothing more than common sense. Teachers can set up a series of favourite phrases in their own words, which they can reproduce easily and there is an integrated spell checker to help reduce mistakes. Teachers can also cut and paste text from other applications, like Word or Excel if required. It has clearly been developed with teachers in mind and it works the way you would expect it to work.”
i2Reporting’s flexibility means that teachers can add notes to reports that don’t appear on the finished document but are useful in helping checkers complete the audit trail. “We can see where we are with every student, in every subject, at any time. We also have complete flexibility over how the system looks. i2Q spent some time with us initially setting it up, but now we can make the changes ourselves where appropriate. The system itself resides on i2Q’s servers, so we know it is very secure and very reliable,” she adds.
Ms Jane Wainwright, Headteacher of Wycombe High School, has also seen the real and immediate benefits of the system. “i2Report gives us a clean and consistent look and feel to every report. It also gives me the opportunity to check the status of any report and if changes need to be made, this can be done easily and quickly and without any stress. The system lets us analyse the data with much more accuracy and detail than before, allowing us to provide parents with more relevant and personalised information.”
Catharine Darnton concludes, “i2Report has revolutionised report-writing at Wycombe High School. It is a powerful, yet easy to use system that now we simply couldn’t do without. It has been praised by every teacher in the school, because it does what is was purchased to do - make the process of writing, checking and delivering student reports easier, faster and much more efficient.”
