We were delighted to speak with Chelsea Sandbrook about how Manor Leas Junior Academy has used Insight to reduce workload
Reducing assessment workload at Manor Leas Junior Academy
“Insight has massively decreased our workload across school – for both teachers and assessment leads.”
As the Assessment Lead at a large junior school, I knew that any tracking system would need to be able to cope with our specific needs. Our assessment system needed to be simplified; it needed to be robust and personalised yet user-friendly and not demanding of teachers’ time.
Reclaiming hours of teachers’ time
When I was first introduced to Insight I knew it would be the system that would solve many of our problems. We had been tracking individual objectives previously, which had dramatically increased teacher workload. Moving away from this and focusing primarily on summative scores has given our teachers hours of time back each week.
We’re able to adapt Insight to suit our specific needs and track only the assessments we use – GL Assessment, STAR Reading and Maths alongside Comparative Judgement. Insight gives us the choice to do all this easily. Their team are friendly and have always been on hand to assist me.
An easy move to make
We had an in-school visit from James Pembroke who showed us how simple but intuitive Insight is.
We really liked what we saw so James made contact with Insight HQ for us and within half hour their helpful team had set up a trial account for us. It was so quick and easy to access. Our data was transferred over seamlessly and Insight is so easy to use that I was able to upload the whole school’s data within a matter of minutes. It’s so easy to retrieve current and historical data – it’s all in one place, ready at a click of a button!
Cutting out the admin
My main aim when looking at a tracking system was to take away as much unnecessary administration as possible from my teachers, to save them time and limit their teacher workload. Insight allows us to do this. I’m easily able to upload data for the entire school using their incredibly simple upload tool, and now the spreadsheets I had spent days creating are completely obsolete.
We have all our data in one place, it’s easily accessible by Senior Leaders, the SENCo and teachers and with a few clicks you are able to look at a pupil’s entire historical data history. This has been invaluable for our teachers in understanding the whole picture of pupil achievement over time.
Our previous tracking system involved entering masses of unnecessary and unwanted data – so simply by moving to Insight we have massively cut the workload for our teachers and assessment leads.
Time saving technology
As a school we used to spend a lot of time manually compiling information in a variety of different spreadsheets and databases, which was time consuming and not always easy to retrieve or amend.
I am happy to say Insight has massively decreased our workload across school – for both teachers and assessment leads. Teachers can easily access data and as part of the SLT I can readily look at data across the whole school as well as individual cohorts.
Entering data is incredibly easy – you can choose how much or how little data you and your teachers enter. You’re totally in control of what goes in.
We recently enabled the Assembly link between our MIS and Insight – another time saving function (no more CTFs to keep pupil information up to date). This was really easy to set up and I was so impressed that this was up and running within a couple of hours.
I am really impressed with Insight’s reporting tools. They are simple to use and understand and I like that I can access data in any format I want. As a Junior school it’s great that I can compare current data against KS1 results. The individual pupil page is a really useful tool to see a snapshot of pupil information, and also to view progress and check who is meeting expectations. I’ve also used the parent reports for the first time this year – very useful for showing parents results against targets.
Insight has allowed us to know our pupils
Initially, I managed Insight myself so as not to overburden my staff, but having done training they all find it very uncomplicated and are comfortable entering data. They love using it as they can instantly see where their pupils are at and they feel much more confident in tracking their own classes.
“Some have gone as far as saying they feel they know their children a lot better since using Insight!”