Introduction
In late 2020, the Sisra Analytics team was excited to join the Juniper Education family, bringing with them hundreds of years of secondary school knowledge and experience.
We all know that a pupil’s secondary education journey starts in primary school with year 6 children transitioning with baseline data and if they follow an expected trajectory they could potentially achieve X by the end of year 11. Some secondary schools assess using GCSE 9-1 grades from years 7 to 11, but many don’t believe giving a student a GCSE grade at age 11 is the right thing to do.
So what is Sisra Analytics and why do nearly half of the secondary schools in England use it?
Sisra Analytics is a web-based platform for analysing KS3, KS4 and KS5 pupil data. It allows users to upload not just attainment or exam data but to triangulate pastoral data such as attendance, behaviour, or attitude to learning data too.
Sisra Analytics allows schools the flexibility to use whatever grade method works for their school – be it percentages, raw marks, mastery descriptors or sub-grades. A basic requirement you might think, but it’s something our competitors can’t always offer and sets Sisra Analytics apart in the marketplace.
Analysing and interrogating pupil, class, or cohort data can be dull and time-consuming, so to help teachers maximise teaching time, we have developed a platform that makes this complex and daunting task more intuitive, with information readily available in a user-friendly format.
Sisra Analytics has been an invaluable tool for schools like Fullhurst Community College and The Burgate School to customise many aspects of the platform to suit their school setting to encourage engagement, and further reduce senior leadership analysis time.
Don’t just believe our word – one Executive Head Teacher has said:
“I would recommend Sisra Analytics to all school as the single best product that had been developed to help schools. All in all, a fantastic product and one that I couldn’t do without!”
Sir Ken Gibson, Executive Head Teacher, Harton Academy, South Tyneside
A time of change and uncertainty
In 2016, when year 6 pupils took their SATs, they were faced with a new style of not only tests but new style results moving on from national curriculum levels such as 3a, 4b and 5c to a standardised score between 80 and 120. Since then, secondary schools have been waiting to find out what headline calculations will look like using these new style baselines.
Many, many schools have asked me what scaled score would put their student into the high prior attainment band, but this is something that no one had the answer to.
In January 2021, Gavin Williamson announced that exams would again be cancelled for students and again that no performance tables will be released by the Department for Education. Schools have waited for five years to find out what results were going to look like after the change of baselines and now they’re going to have to wait for at least another year.
Sisra Analytics customers are definitely at an advantage here. Thanks to so many schools allowing us to use their anonymised results, we are able to create our own ‘national’ dataset using the anonymised data of 1400 schools, 225,000 students and a whopping 1.9 million grades. From this, schools might now be able to answer the question above, as well as other questions such as “how do I know how my students did in Maths GCSE compared to others nationally?”, “is the disadvantaged gap in my school similar to other schools?” and “I believe that Fred Smith has done fantastically in all of his subjects but how can I confirm this?”.
As my colleague Charlotte mentioned in her article Sisra Observe Turning Data in to Information, our roadmap is super exciting. Features for multi-academy trusts such as comparing headlines or qualifications across schools is on not too far on the horizon, as well as full integration with your MIS.
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