Power BI Assessment Tracker Reports for the Holy Cross MAC in Coventry

Sheaf Digital has developed a series of Power BI assessment reports for the Holy Cross Multi Academy Company in Coventry.

The 5 Holy Cross primary schools use the Arbor school management information system. The new Microsoft Power BI reports connect to Arbor’s data warehouse and give staff in schools and the central team a joined up and accurate view of student achievement in years 1 to 6.

The reports were developed with Power BI Desktop and then uploaded into the online Power BI Service. The shared reports are then set to refresh automatically every 24 hours.

The main report is a multi-page assessment report with data organised by key stage. The team at Holy Cross can now use this interactive report to view and explore data that includes:

• Key Stages 1 & 2 context information - overall students numbers, SEN, PP, EAL, FSM etc.

• DFE assessment data for reading, writing and maths at both KS1 & KS2.

• More detailed information about student attainment in the DFE assessments at KS2. That includes a breakdown of student numbers reaching the expected standard and greater depth for each of the context groups (SEN, PP etc).

• In-house reading, writing & maths assessments for Y1 - Y6. Again there are results for all students and each of the context groups.

• Phonics screening results.

The benefits of using Microsoft Power BI to report and share data about student attainment are:

• Sharing reports across the schools in your multi-academy trust is easy with the Power BI online service - no more sending Excel files as email attachments. Invest in the initial development and then save a a significant amount of staff time moving forwards.

• You can set the report to refresh each day - if you build the report with data from your MIS provider’s data warehouse. The Arbor snowflake data warehouse is refreshed overnight and Power BI automatically pulls in these updates.

• There’s a huge benefit that comes from focusing effort on designing and building a report (or series of reports) that give staff easy access to data so they can compare schools, year groups and academic years. You can tweak the reports over time - as staff develop their own understanding of what they need - and embed a more data driven culture across your schools.

Sheaf Digital’s work for Holy Cross is a good example of how we leverage both our education and software/data analysis experience when we develop Power BI reports for schools. We understand the kind of data that stakeholders want to see, we can respond quickly to new requests and we can suggest user-friendly layouts and interactions that present the data that schools collect in a simple and easy-to-understand format.

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