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How do you simplify student assessment reporting across Y7 - Y13 when one academic year’s worth of data is almost 50 spreadsheets? And at the same time you want to create a solution that works across previous academic years, so you can use the data that’s archived in dozens of older spreadsheets to analyse trends over time?

LVS Ascot asked Sheaf Digital to work with them to build a solution with Microsoft Power BI. The school wanted a super simple, teacher-friendly report that would update automatically and be completely aligned with their current approach to student assessment.

Sheaf Digital has just developed two Power BI reports - attendance and assessments - for the Aurora Academies Trust. The 7 schools in the trust use Arbor and both new reports link to the trust’s Arbor data warehouse.

The reports are bespoke - designed to exactly meet Aurora’s requirements. The assessment report builds on and supports Aurora’s existing Y1-6 teacher assessment approach. That is a key benefit of a simple bespoke Power BI report - it supports what the trust is already doing, making it easier to share assessment outcomes and spot children who may need further support.

Good decisions start with good data and even a simple dashboard can tell you a lot about patterns in attendance, trends over time and how different schools and groups of students within schools compare to each other.

Attendance data isn't complex and a good dashboard isn't difficult to build - but you have to be able to get the data. Ideally, what you want is data that is as close to real-time as possible and that normally means you need a connection to a data warehouse that contains data from your MIS. Typically that data is updated overnight.

Most schools still default to spreadsheets for reporting student assessment results. It's a solution that works because everyone has access to Excel, but it’s often time consuming and the end result - usually shared with colleagues via email - is static, not really interactive and it soon gets out of date.

This is one way to build a very simple Power BI report to track student assessment performance. It illustrates three things:

• The importance of understanding relationships between tables, even in simple reports. Your Power BI model - the tables and the relationships/joins between them - is the foundation of good reports.

• How some simple measures are needed to make the data and the report more useful.

• Why it is important to keep the report as simple as possible - reports with lots of interactivity and multiple themes can be fun to create, but they often confuse users.

Get Started with Power BI is our beginner’s Power BI training course. We’ve designed it for people who have little or no experience with Microsoft Power BI.

The course is built around a series of hands-on report writing activities. Like all our Power BI courses, we put a lot of emphasis on practical, real-world activities in Power BI Desktop.

Sheaf Digital delivered a one day Microsoft Power BI training course at Pocklington School near York in January.

Pocklington School uses the iSAMS school management information system and an important objective during the training day was understanding how data from iSAMS - exported as a spreadsheet - could be imported into Power BI

Sheaf Digital has just delivered two days of Microsoft Power BI training to the management information and systems teams at Wakefield College.

The Wakefield team has extensive SQL Server Reporting Services experience and now wants to begin to use Power BI to share reports and dashboards with colleagues. The training included plenty of time to discuss how Power BI could be implemented in the college.

This is a MS Excel export from a school management information system. It’s a report - basically a pivot table - that contains student attainment data that we want to use in a Power BI report. At the moment it’s the only way we can get the data we want out of this particular management information system.

The problem with the export is the format. Power BI works best when the source data is a simple table - just column headers, no row headers. That’s not at all what we’ve got.

Sheaf Digital recently delivered 2 days of Power BI Training to staff at the Brigantia Learning Trust in Sheffield. The trust operates 4 academies including one post-16 college.

The training included a one day introduction to Power BI course for staff from both the central team and Longley Park Sixth Form Academy and then a follow up session where the focus was how Longley Park Sixth Form Academy could use data from v2 of the Arbor Snowflake data warehouse.