Data is only useful if it's easy to understand.

Soaring expectations have been placed on teachers in recent years, and the coronavirus pandemic has only served to worsen the burden. Alongside a decline in work-life balance, salary, and job satisfaction, it is no wonder that one in three teachers plan to quit the profession within the next five years. It’s not that teachers are falling out of love with teaching – it’s that the job now involves so much more than that, including things that teachers didn’t sign up for. A key component is the massive demand for the tracking of their students’ performance, including data collation, information analysis and the reporting of metrics at regular intervals.

Schools Attain’s founders know this struggle too well – myself and my co-founder, Dave, are both Heads of IT and Computer Science in Cheshire high schools. We saw that valuable teacher time is spent trying to understand poor quality and confusing data, and believe that time should instead be spent helping students to achieve their potential. This fact drove the creation of Schools Attain. We wanted a teacher-friendly system for data analytics in schools that allowed members of the profession to fall in love with their jobs again. That’s exactly what we have created. Our first-hand classroom experience allowed us to build a product that really does work for teachers (including ourselves).

We know that teachers are not data scientists – and they don’t want to be. Schools Attain provides a logical solution to let you understand your school’s data at a glance. Whilst training can be provided, it certainly isn’t necessary. The system just makes sense, with an intuitive design and logical user paths. It turns data into usable information that is easy to digest. Important data items are obvious, conclusions can be drawn quickly and data downloaded from the system in just two clicks. Schools Attain is accessible to all staff at all times, entirely removing the need for the preparation of multiple levels of reports for SLT members.

The bottom line is: the less time you spend figuring out and reporting class data, the more time you can spend doing what you love – actually teaching!