A Simple Student Assessment Dashboard - Prague British International School

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and the end result - usually shared with colleagues via email - is static, not really interactive and it soon gets out of date.

The Prague British International School (PBIS) wanted a better solution. It asked Sheaf Digital to develop a Power BI dashboard that would completely simplify the way data is analysed and then reported to staff - a simple, highly visual report that shows both individual student and teaching group progress across a number of key assessment criteria.

The challenge with this job was the source & format of the data - it came in separate spreadsheets. The main table in Excel was an export - lots of columns - from the school’s iSAMS management information system. The ideal solution is one that connects to a data warehouse, but with iSAMS that option isn’t available.

The first step was to tidy up the data in Excel and identify the tables - we had multiple tables in one Excel workbook - that we wanted to import into Power BI. That is a manual step.

The next step was to import the data into Power BI and check that the relationships Power BI creates between the tables are correct. The resulting model is the foundation of the dashboard; get the model right and the rest of the solution - measures and interactive visuals - are straightforward..

The measures are just simple counts of the number of students within each grade band, for example:

Maths(7-9) = SUMX(CEM_2024, IF(CEM_2024[Maths Stanine] > 6 && CEM_2024[Maths Stanine] < 10, 1, 0))

Measures like that can then be dropped into donut chart visuals to show the % of students within each band in each skill/assessment area:

That dashboard is easy to understand. You can pick a year group, you can switch between all students, boys and girls and you can see - at a glance - how the students are doing in different areas. That’s an important point - interactive reports are great, but too many options and too much interactivity becomes confusing. It’s always better to split one complicated report into separate, simpler reports.

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