|
"The in-house legal team at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea has used Timebase for over 11 years.... The practical and technical support from Tricostar is second to none and we look forward to upgrading to the latest version of this system early in 2007."
Don Pitts, Business Manager, Legal Services, The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea "We wanted to have a European partner with a deep understanding of incident management and different underlying technologies, Lotus Domino in this case, and Tricostar fitted these criteria perfectly."
Kari Jarnstrom, Head of Business Solutions at Uponor, Finland |
 Tricostar Case Study
Sefton Education Authority
The client
Sefton Council’s Local Authority (Education)
The challenge
Dr Alan Irving, Director of Schools and Young People, says:
“We needed a system to allow schools to self evaluate more easily in order to comply with OFSTED requirements, and to make that information accessible.”
The solution
“Tricostar Evaluation – an interactive, on-line self evaluation package designed specifically for education.”
The key outcomes:
- Development: “The LEA can now access the schools’ self evaluation reports and identify common priorities for development.”
- Accessibility: “The evaluations can be posted on-line by the schools and can be easily accessed by the LEA.”
- Sharing: “This on-line service provides a way of sharing good practice across all our schools.”
- Success: “The piloting of Tricostar Evaluation has proved extremely successful as evidenced in subsequent OFSTED inspections of the schools involved.”
Tricostar Education’s new on-line self-evaluation service for schools was developed in partnership with Sefton Council’s local education authority.
The authority recognised the growing emphasis on self-evaluation and began developing a paper-based self-evaluation system three years ago. This was followed by an electronic version that has now evolved into the on-line system for schools and LEAs.
Designed to provide a one-stop shop for consistent evaluation, it is linked directly to OFSTED criteria providing everything a school needs to complete the S4 form.
After successful early trials, it has been adopted by Sefton Education Authority and is now used by all schools in the area.
Its effectiveness has been recognised by OFSTED. A report on one of Sefton’s schools using the system stated: “This system of planning is most effective because it is on-going and flexible. Action plans are drawn up by staff and are very easy to follow and the head teacher has added costing to the system so that spending is linked closely to identified need.”
Denah Jones, Pupil Progress Manager at Maghull High School has been using the service for eight months. She explained: “It has ensured that the management of self-evaluation has become a well integrated process across the whole school.”
Used by the management team and all heads of department it has enabled information to be shared across the school. Findings are used to identify common areas across departments so that training needs, resource issues and staffing requirements can be effectively highlighted.
Denah added: “It is a thorough system. Because there is consistency of information across the whole school it is very easy to identify strengths and areas for development, then use that information to develop an action plan.
“It has speeded up the self-evaluation process, particularly the collation of information.”
All information is fed into the online service and a profile of the school illustrates strengths and weaknesses across a range of areas.
Maghull High School is just one of 16 schools in the Sefton cluster using the system. As a result a new collaborative approach between schools has developed.
It has also enabled schools with a particular strength in a given area to share experience with a school experiencing problems in the same area, allowing best practice to be shared
The final word
“We are delighted with the system, so much so we have joined forces with Tricostar to market it to other LEAs based on the belief that the key to raising standards is through promoting self-managing and self evaluating schools.”
|
|
