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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and the end result - usually shared with colleagues via email - is static, not really interactive and it soon gets out of date.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.

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.

Multi-academy trusts (MATS) face particular challenges when they try to collect, organise and then report on data.

• Data can be stored in different systems in different schools.

• The central trust team wants a whole-trust view.

• MATS and schools can be short on technical resources. Staff are busy and don’t always have the time or expertise needed to get an efficient solution up and running

Sheaf Digital has developed a series of Power BI reports for the St Francis & St Clare Catholic Multi Academy Company (SFSCMAC) in Wolverhampton.

All 12 academies use the Arbor school management information system and the Power BI reports use data from Arbor’s Snowflake data warehouse. The way the data is organised in the data warehouse simplified the development of reports that now give the Trust a joined-up view of assessments, attendance and student demographics across all 12 academies.