Using Data to Improve Behaviour & Raise Attainment

A study by Graham Sawyer of The Royal Manor School, Portland, Dorset

This article looks at how we use data, in particular sleuth and PASS*, to monitor, track and improve behaviour across the College.

Royal Manor Arts College (RMAC) is an 11-16 mixed comprehensive school with 750 students specialising in the Performing Arts. The School is on the Island of Portland off the South Coast of Dorset. The island has a population of 15,000 people and at the moment is probably most famous for its building stone. However, this is likely to change in 2012 when the island becomes the base for the Olympic Sailing events. However idyllic this part of the world may sound it is not without its problems and the College has a very mixed in take. 15 % are entitled to school free meals and one part of the island's deprivation index is very similar to an inner city area. The school has a 43% A_C rate but with a Contextual Value Added score of 1014.

sleuth is a computer system by which all positive and negative incidents which occur in the College can be recorded and then the data used to help the College improve the behaviour and attitudes of the students.

At RMAC we have used the system since 2002 and now imagining life without it is very difficult. The great advantage of sleuth is that at a tap on the keyboard you can bring up a wide range of data about the sorts of behaviour which are occurring and show up any patterns. For instance you can look at, in graphical or tabular form, whole school trends, year group trends, tutor group analysis, departmental analysis, behaviour type analysis, individual student analysis and progression over time from time of day to years. Each selection of data can be produced for positive and negative behaviours.

For our College the incident data is first written in paper form as a referral which goes through HOD and Tutor, before being passed to a Teaching Assistant or Admin Assistant who inputs the data onto the computer system. With experience, inputting one event takes about 30 seconds once you know what you are doing.

We now have one member of the office staff who is the 'sleuth expert' who can produce any information that a member of staff would request. She also puts together reports for all department meetings and year group meetings and this data is always on the agenda of these meetings to be discussed. At the moment we have sleuth available on 6 computers in the college hence this system. It would be possible to have it on all computers and then teachers could input data as soon as it occurred rather than writing a hard copy. I believe a number of schools do this but due to computer memory limitations and cost we have yet to achieve this goal.

So having all this data is all very well but how can it be used? Below are some of the ways we use it to try to improve the behaviour and attitudes of our students. One of the first impacts it had was by showing clearly the time of day that we had the greatest number of negative incidents. We expected that the last lesson of the day would have the most negative incidents. In fact it was shown very clearly to be the lesson following morning break, which had nearly twice the number of incidents of any other lesson. By using this graph we were able to discuss amongst staff and students about why this occurred. A number of theories were put forward:

• Only 15 minutes is not long enough for students to let off steam or for staff to actually get a break.


• Is the food in the canteen and in tuck machines too high in e factors?


• It was the only lesson of the day where teachers were often beaten to the classroom by students, etc.

As a result of these discussions for the following school year we put a number of actions in place:

• 5 minutes longer break


• Removal of tuck machines


• Removal of certain drinks in canteen (this was well before Jamie Oliver)

Within a couple of months of starting this plan we were able to look at sleuth to see if we had been successful and it showed conclusively that after break was no longer any worse than any other lesson. Since all the changes were made together, the only thing sleuth could not answer was which change had the biggest impact.

The data in sleuth can be used to look at a whole range of whole school issues, trends can be quickly spotted, analysed and addressed in the same way the break issue was resolved. For instance we had a wide range of differences in the number of positive rewards given out and we needed to become more consistent. One way of highlighting this issue was just to put a graph of the data on the staffroom board. This caused a major discussion amongst staff about the number of merits and suitability of the reward structure. Departments who were at the top of the list tended to slightly lessen the number of rewards given, while those at the bottom increased the rewards. By simply using one graph we had started the discussion and brought greater consistency to our reward system.

The Senior Leadership Team could also use the data to look at staff members who may have needed more support than they were currently getting. Obviously this has to be done sensitively to avoid it looking like an attempt to 'spy' on staff.

As well as whole school issues sleuth has been even more useful with individual students. My main role at RMAC has been as a HOY and running a Learning Support Centre. In each of these roles sleuth data with individual students is crucial. I can sit down with individual students and look at their data. This has to be done sensitively and what will work with one student may not work with another. You need to know your students or have an understanding of the PASS data you have on them but if it is used effectively it can be extremely successful.

I was able to show one student that he was bottom of the list for scoring the most referrals for the whole year group . In this case he definitely was embarrassed by this and we were able to set him a target of when this could change and how he could change it. Within two months he had dramatically improved his behaviour; this had been his wake up call. We were then able to show him this improvement by looking at the monthly graph which had fallen away remarkably. Parents came in as well and were also very impressed and rewarded him at home. This might have occurred without sleuth but the data had given the student, parent and myself the firm evidence that we needed to see if he was making progress.

Another student we were concerned about seemed to show little pattern at first but we looked at the graph to show 'day of the week'. This showed a huge rise in his problems on a Friday. We showed him the graph and then he was able to say it was down to tiredness. It transpired he had a part-time job on a Thursday evening and didn't get home till late. This gave us something to work on, we were able to show this graph to his Mum, she then insisted he finished earlier or didn't work at all during term time, a remarkable improvement in behaviour followed. We might have achieved this without sleuth but the hard evidence and clear graphs meant it was obvious to everyone.

Another example was where a Year 10 student who was getting into trouble in a number of lessons and the pattern seemed to be the same. Teachers saying, 'He is a bright boy but he doesn't put any effort into his work and never gets it finished. When I tell him off about this he gets angry and gets himself in big trouble.'

We looked at his CATS scores which backed up he was intelligent (CATs score of over 110) and sleuth certainly said all his problems occurred in classrooms where the work tended to be book based. Could it be a reading issue or eyesight etc? PASS showed up an extremely low perceived learning capability (PLC). Was this a case of a student not actually believing that he could do the work? A lot of work was done with him to promote self esteem and to show him that he was brighter than he thought. Result: a fall in poor lesson behaviour and a rise in PASS scores.

Those are some of the ways we have used PASS and sleuth throughout the whole school. My role in school is to run a Learning Support Centre where the aim is to cut exclusions, so here we find the data invaluable. For any student that comes into the Centre we collect data on sleuth and PASS and this is a major factor in the work we put in with them. We can set targets relating to this so that in the Centre, and on return these can be the key factors to improve. For one boy we could target something as specific as gum chewing and bringing the correct equipment. These minor problems were often escalating into major incidents as they were leading to arguments with teachers. We can then use this data again when they have returned to the main school to monitor progress and to boost self esteem and prove to students the improvements that they have made.

We don't claim to have all the ideas or answers but what we do know is that through using this data we can show that behaviour has improved across the school as a whole and that the impression the students have about the college has greatly improved. This is particularly useful data when writing the college SEF!

* PASS is an attitudinal survey carried out online by a company called W3 Insights.

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