Group FAQ
Find out what Lessons Learned – our online system for monitoring and evaluating teaching and learning, performance management and CPD – can do for your MAT or cluster using our interactive tool below.
As a leader of a multi-academy trust, group or school cluster, what is most important to you with regards to supporting your schools?
Ensuring that all your staff know what good and outstanding teaching looks like can be challenging enough within just one school, never mind across a whole group of schools.
Lessons Learned comes with a free set of Ofsted-aligned frameworks written by our experts. These cover lesson observations, TA/LSA observations, EYFS observations, learning walks and more.
Trying to move your focus away from the Ofsted criteria? The system can also be used with your own frameworks and our friendly support team will help you set them up.
At Lessons Learned we recognise that what works for one school may not work for another. That’s why we set about creating a versatile system capable of dealing with various approaches to monitoring teaching and learning.
Your schools can continue monitoring in a way that suits them and you can decide which of that data to aggregate by identifying commonality across your schools’ forms.
For example, let’s say School A monitors something they call ‘Behaviour and Safety’. School B monitors ‘Behaviour for Learning’ and School C monitors ‘Pupil Attitudes to Learning’. As a MAT or cluster, we might combine the results for these focal points into a single monitored aspect that we call ‘Behaviour’.
Lessons Learned will then allow you to report on how often Behaviour is a focus in your schools, what judgements are most frequently made against it, and how many strengths and areas for development are recognised within it.
Nobody wants to waste time sitting in traffic; it’s bad for the environment and bad for our stress levels. But if your schools are still monitoring teaching and learning using paper based forms then you may have to visit them more regularly to stay in the loop.
With Lessons Learned, your schools can securely enter their data online for it to be checked in real time by you and your team – wherever you are.
With Lessons Learned you can see exactly which areas your schools are recording the most development points and strengths against and then use this information to decide which CPD would be most worthwhile.
Providing you have individual school access, you can also identify opportunities for intra-school support.
As soon as your schools enter their forms into the system, Lessons Learned gets to work with the number crunching to provide you with beautifully clear graphs and tables for instant sharing with unexpected visitors.
If your schools are grading then you’ll see graphs that aggregate these judgements like the ones below.
You’ll also get top level data on development points and strengths set in your schools, allowing you to identify the most commonly used categories for both of these. The graph below shows the number of development points assigned across a group of schools. The blue bars represent the total figure and the red bars represent the total minus any that have been marked by schools as ‘complete’.
Look at the diary of any headteacher and you’ll see that a typical week consists of back to back commitments. Whilst the majority of these tasks require a high level of expertise and can’t be outsourced, there are certain non-specialised tasks (such as entering data into multiple spreadsheets or chasing down staff for their latest reports) that can become a real drain on resources.
Lessons Learned helps to reduce the workload for your staff by ensuring they only have to enter data once for it to be visible to all who need to see it. Headteachers can catch up on where their sub team are at with just a few clicks of a mouse. Likewise, group leaders can easily track where individual schools are at without having to request paperwork or access to a spreadsheet.
Our latest notification feature also makes swift work of informing staff of any new observations.
For staff that are yet to participate in observations, Lessons Learned is an ideal tool for helping them to learn the ropes. Our user-friendly interface makes creating forms a breeze and the structure of Lessons Learned (as customised by your school or group) will ensure that all staff know what to look out for regardless of whether they’re conducting a lesson observation, learning walk, book scrutiny or other form of monitoring.
All of our servers are UK based and our website is encrypted so you and your staff know that your data is private and secure. We also have robust policies in place for dealing with sensitive information (such as password resets) so you can be certain that nobody sees what they shouldn’t.
Within the system itself, you can assign roles to your staff and then define what each role should have access to. Staff can be given access to forms for specific subjects or year groups and appraisal structures are done on a person-by-person basis.
Lessons Learned has been built to accommodate the various ways in which schools choose to monitor teaching and learning and has a front-end tool for building frameworks that are aligned to the way your schools work. Specify areas that you wish to monitor, choose whether or not you grade those and, if you want to, create your very own bank of descriptors that your staff can use as a guide.
Even if your schools aren’t grading, it can sometimes be useful to give some form of judgment so that you’re able to get a clear overview of where teaching and learning is at. With Lessons Learned, you can create your own ‘grade’ or judgment sets and then apply them to which ever forms you wish. For example, you might be happy to Ofsted grade your lesson observations, but prefer to RAG rate your learning walks.
As an online system, Lessons Learned can be accessed anywhere, anytime meaning that your staff will always be able to check headline figures before visiting a school. It’s also responsive, which means it’ll work on your laptop, tablet and phone – perfect for staff who are always on the fly.
Providing your schools are happy with it, Lessons Learned can be set up to give group leaders access to both aggregated data and individual school data. Identify the top trends with your Group View dashboard, and then dive in for a closer analysis as necessary.
If results are being skewed by particular individuals, you’ll be able to spot who they are and provide the support they need to get back on track.
Whether they differ by phase or region, every school has its own way of doing things and so it might not always make sense to view your data all together. Lessons Learned allows you to filter by school, phase, region and even the amount of time that a school has been part of your group, meaning you get a comprehensive analysis tailored to your current situation.
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