Educational writer and former headteacher Gerald Haigh visits Eleanor Palmer Primary in Camden to discover the benefits of good data management systems and policies in schools.

The headline is deliberate. Kate Frood, head of Eleanor Palmer Primary School in Camden says, `It's been suggested to me that we're a "data-driven school", but I'm not sure I like the idea that we're "driven" by data. "Empowered" is better.' For her, it's a simple matter of what comes first - data analysis or teaching and learning.

Making the job easy
Schools are expected to collect performance data on their pupils. Once, it was all kept in a filing cabinet. It still is, of course, but in addition it's normally available, in every school, on computer software that makes it more visible, more manageable and more readily presented in a range of forms to whoever wants it or has the right to it.
More importantly, it can be made so accessible that it becomes a practical aid to teaching and learning by showing up individual and group strengths and weaknesses across the curriculum.
At Eleanor Palmer, Kate Frood is an enthusiast for the possibilities of the right sort of pupil performance software, seeing it as part of her basic equipment. With its help, she says, it becomes possible to organise the information on your pupils, before your eyes, on the screen, in ways that are instantly useful. You can

• boil down masses of data into quick summaries under a range of useful headings
  
• look at the performance of individual pupils, or groups, or the whole school
  
• make endless comparisons - group with group, pupil with pupil, your school with other schools
  
• also compare over time - tracking the progress of individuals and groups.

What to put in?
You could load up your software with all kinds of data. You could collect any number of classroom test and assessment results and put them together to make summative judgements about children's progress. You might, for example, type in teacher assessments of children's progress each half-term, based either on class marks or on your own tests - and there have been schools where exactly that's happened.
The trouble with this is that you can't be sure of the reliability and validity of the marks you're putting in - judgements differ, tests aren't always tightly written or carefully marked. That means that when, maybe months later, you get the summaries and comparisons out, you'll find yourself studying percentages and comparative performances which are actually quite spurious, based as they are on unreliable input.
This kind of occurrence is more common than most think. The head of a Midlands school who's done a great deal of research in this area says: `People assume that anything the computer produces must be accurate, but it's only as accurate as what was Put into it in the first place.'
The rule, then, is this - only put into your software data which you are confident about.
Kate Frood agrees. 'We only put in the SAT results
~ for Years 2 and 6, and the optional ones at Years 3, 4 and 5. We don't keep computer records of any other performance data.'

Good data can:

• confirm teacher judgements, providing them with credibility and authenticity that will stand up to doubts and questions - from parents, local authority, government, funding bodies, inspectors, governors, colleagues in other schools.
  
• add a quantified measure (a mark, a level, a grade) to a teacher judgement that may be valid and useful but less precise.
  
• unpick the detail of 'a child's strengths and weaknesses - homing in on exactly which skills within a subject are stronger or weaker than others.
  
• provide standardised, quantified grades, marks or levels that can then be used to make comparisons between individuals, groups or whole school
  
• spring surprises by uncovering weaknesses or' strengths that were not previously known or fully understood..

With easily managed data you can:

• more easily make teaching and learning judgements based on a deep understanding of where the needs are of a pupil, a group, the whole school
• set targets, in line with your own or with the authority's requirements
• present evidence of progress to interested bodies - governors, parents, the authority.

Kate Frood reaps all of these advantages. So, for example, she's not happy with the idea of externally imposed targets, and is able to use her computer to devise school targets of her own that are robust enough to stand up to scrutiny. `I didn't accept the authority telling us we have to get a certain percentage,' she says. 'I went the other way. From pupil level I generated class targets, then school targets.`

She sets targets well in advance, sitting with the class teacher and her laptop, looking at each pupil in turn and using a screen that's dedicated to target setting. 'We look at the child's performance, but we may adjust the target on the basis of the conversation.'
Because her own target-setting process is careful and based on good data, it usually lines up well with the school target that's brought along to the school by the authority. `1'm never challenged on our targets,' she says.

Standard progress
What she particularly likes about the software she's chosen, both for target setting and for pupil tracking in general, is that it makes considerable use of the notion of a child's `standard progress' - that is the progress that a child can be expected to make year on year. Comparisons of a child's actual progress are with his or her `standard progress' and not just with a notional average child.
`I really like that. And 1 like the way the colour coding follows it. So if a child's performance is where it should be it's highlighted in yellow. If it's better than standard it's green and if it's worse it's red. So I can scroll through a Year 5 class, a page per child, looking for the reds. Equally I can get the whole class up and instantly see who's below progress in maths or whatever.'

Governors
That same clarity and colour coding makes presentations to governors, on whiteboard or data projector, properly informative, provoking the right questions and good discussion in a way that a paper file can't do. Good software, too, like that used at Eleanor Palmer, will boil figures down into various kinds of graphs, layering one on top of another where appropriate so as to illustrate comparisons and rates of progress.

Self-evaluation
The government has made it clear that we're into an era of self-evaluation. The Ofsted vision is of a school that judges its own performance, backing its conclusions up with lucid and accurate data, valid for all comparisons. In effect, they're striking a bargain that goes: 'You're still getting outside inspections. There may even be more of them. But they'll be less intrusive, shorter, with smaller teams, at shorter notice, and, by implication, less of a hassle for all concerned. Your bit of the bargain, though, is to provide us with good, accurate self-evaluation data.'

Kate Frood, like other heads, is very much aware of this. 'Self-evaluation is going to have to be analytical and not just descriptive.' she says. 'With my system I can get the detail I need, and be ready to show how we're dealing with the teaching and learning issues that are throwing. up. So now when I do my self­ evaluation form, I have my pupil progress software open at the bottom of the screen, where I can keep bringing it up. I've found it an incredibly useful tool. The SEF is ahuge exercise, and the software's really useful in dealing with it.'