Hello. First of all, I'm sorry that we couldn't have our webinar in person. Hopefully this recording will go some way to show you what the products we have can do for you, how they can be customised, and then how the school can benefit. So, very briefly, we're going to look at GridMaker, which will help you track record evidence of how your school delivers personal development. So that includes SMSC, British Values, RSE, Physical Health and Mental Wellbeing, as well as various aspects of PSHE. 

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We're also going to look at how you can use iAbacus, not only just to capture the evidence, but also to evaluate the effectiveness, diagnose where you may be able to make improvements and hopefully how you can sustain or improve that excellent provision that you already have. 

So, let's dive into GridMaker first of all. 

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All of our products are online. So, all you need is a web browser to access them. When you have the GridMaker tool, we essentially give you a web address for your school. So, in this case, you can see Haslingden High School. The web address will be up here. Okay. So, in this case, we just type that web address into the browser. It will bring us down to the password form. We don't have individual user accounts with the grid. We just find it more effective if we just have one web address and one password. You can share that password with any member of staff, they can log on at any time or together in an INSET session or in a training session and access the grid together. So, in your case, I'm just going to copy and paste the password in. I will send you this on email so that you can access your demonstration grid in your own time and share it with colleagues.

So, let's access the grid. As you can see here, it's loaded in quite quickly. We'll come back to the functionality in a moment, but I'll just give you an overview of what you're actually looking at here. 

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You can see that at the moment we're in the SMSC criteria set. So in the black boxes across the top, we've got a whole range of different SMSC values. If I just mouse over them, you can see that we've taken them from the OFSTED guidance that's been provided to schools. If I flick from SMSC into British Values, you'll see the black boxes change. And here we've got the four different British Values. But of late, what's tended to happen is that schools have extended the way that they use GridMaker and actually capture various aspects of personal development as a whole.

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So you can see now that not only do we have SMSC and British Values, we're also able to capture any evidence of RSE. And you'll see there's various aspects to that. But also physical health and mental wellbeing. In secondary, if you are delivering the Gatsby benchmarks for careers and information and guidance, then you've got those in there too. And then optionally, if you want them, the PSHE Association frameworks are available. To be honest, the grid is about customising it to your school. So, if you've got school values or academy values, let us build those into the grid for you. You can do it yourself through the admin interface, but you get a high level of support with the Grid. So, if you want us to do that for you, we're more than happy to log into your grid and add your different values.

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Down the left hand side, down here in the spectrum here, you can see different areas or different types of activities. So, after school clubs, assemblies, competitions, themed days and themed weeks. And then different curriculum areas. Okay. And again, this list can be tailored to suit your school. So, the idea with the Grid is that we make it really simple for someone to add an activity or a lesson, a learning activity into the Grid, and to do that, they normally click on this great big plus icon here. That will launch a form. Now on this form, we have information about the activity on the left and then the different criteria that it covers on the right. So what I'll do, is I'll just enter an activity. I actually found one on your website that I thought was very useful to put into the Grid. It looked like it was a whole school event.

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What was it actually? It was some charity work. We'll put it in as a specific year group, just so you can see that functionality. Again, if you have houses or tutor groups, or you group your learners in a specific way, then we can change this grouping in the tool. You can do it with your admin login, or we can do it for you. So, let's just say it was a year nine activity. I'm going to copy and paste the activity because I've got it here on a clipboard. So, it was actually some community work, collecting food for our community food box in Haslingden. And then there was a nice description on the website so I think we'll just paste that in here in the description. So, we've got an activity. I don't think you'd expect staff to enter a lot of information into here.

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Just a brief description of what the activity was and what learners of how they were benefiting from it. You can include attachments here. So, if you've got detail in a PDF, you can include that. I can actually attach a photograph here. I was able just to download a photograph of that activity, so I can include that. Then what we do is we choose a date for that activity. We can go back in time and record something that's already happened. Or we might use this tool as a planning tool and record something that's going to happen later in the term or later in the year. So, we choose a date, on the right hand side this is where we get to choose the different SMSC or British Values that this activity covered. So, you can see there's the list. If we're not sure of the detail, we can mouse over those and see the guidance. But it's just a case of choosing the appropriate criteria.

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Now I'm not going to give this too much thought, I'm just going to choose a few to demonstrate the tool. But what is important is that you notice this link at the top here. At the moment, we're looking at the SMSC criteria, but it is important to know that you can also choose other values, other sets of criteria. So, this one activity, it might cover some aspect of the British Values, mutual respect for example. We might be able to also choose something from the Gatsby Framework or some aspect of the RSE Framework. So, friendships, families. Let's have a look at the other ones in here. Mental wellbeing. If it involved some aspect of experiences with workplaces for example, or encounters with higher education, again, you could include those. So, we just choose the relevant criteria and hit save.

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It then drops into the grid in all the relevant cells. So, you can see here on this row for charity work. Here we have our activity with a photograph and the brief description. We did add one earlier for you here. This was your bake sales, where students organised a series of bake sales to raise money for the Red Cross and to help victims in Ukraine. So, what happens is the Grid starts to fill up. With the Grid, price wise, it's £295 per year for primary and £495 per year for secondary. But included in that price is the site licence for everyone to use it. But it also includes your training. And your inset days. So, this grid starts off empty like it is at the moment, but if you host an inset session or a training session with staff, which we will deliver for you, then it soon starts to fill up. And you will see a range of activities dropping to your Grid, showing whole school provision.

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And then it's a case of keeping it topped or setting time aside periodically to make sure that your grid has some new activities added to it. So, the grid fills up quite quickly with your activities. What I will do at this point is just drop into another grid. And this is a demonstration grid where other members of staff have had access to it so that they've added their own activities. So, it's got a range of activities already in it. You can see that visually it builds up. You will have grey areas. Visually you will see where you've got gaps in provision. You might identify strong areas where you've got a lot of coverage in school. The Grid by its nature will demonstrate where you have coverage. If you do have a lot of activities, it will scroll to the right. So for example, you often find that history or assemblies, they cover a lot of value based learning. If you want to look very closely at a specific value, you've got these little bar chart icons here.

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Okay. You can see them next to each value. If you click on one of those, it will give you a stacked bar chart. Okay. So, in this case, we're looking at participating and responding to cultural opportunities. I've got a nice stacked bar chart here. I can actually filter it and I can take out areas that I'm not interested in at this point in time. I can mouse over it to see that okay, in the art and design department, we've got a lot of these kind of activities, but where do they occur? And then interestingly, if you want to, you can download these bar charts to include in a school self-evaluation or a school report or a printable display, a display that you might be doing on value based learning.

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So, the bar charts, quite a nice little feature that you can use. If I just zoom out, I'll be able to exit that. Another way that you often want to share your Grid, is to save it as a PDF document. Okay. So, this might be something you are sharing with governors or stakeholders. It might be that prior to an inspection, you want to give an inspector access to your Grid. There is a guest access actually which you could use, but one of the easiest ways to share your Grid is to save it to a PDF document. So, you can export this PDF document, if I just click on it and you'll see an example one here, it keeps it in the Grid, the visual format. So, here's our Grid. But if I click on here, you'll see that it's got the text descriptions and the criteria covered in each of those activities.

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So, it's a really robust way of sharing your Grid, is to export it as a PDF document and then save it and share it via email or print it if you needed to. The other thing that you may want to do is to filter your grid. Okay, so let's say your Grid fills up over time, what you might want to do at some point is have a look at activities that are carried out by a specific year group or a specific group of learners. Or maybe just those in a particular subject area. So, the filter view is a nice, flexible, powerful functionality. You click on filter view, you choose for example, year seven. You click apply filter and then all of a sudden, you're now looking at a filtered grid, just showing year seven activities.

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So, one of the things that we've heard from schools is that they now use this quite effectively to engage with subject leaders. Okay. And one of the things that you can do is suggest that they use the grid to capture any evidence of SMSC, British Values, RSE that is contained within their subject area. It gets recorded onto the Grid and contributes to this whole school picture of SMSC and personal development. But also they can use the filter view to create a filtered grid, just showing their subject area. It's quite handy because it's a win-win situation. Yes, they contribute to the whole school picture, but also, you are giving them an evidence base or helping them to build an evidence base for their subject area. So, if there's a potential deep dive or an interesting challenging conversation about how they might deliver value based learning in their subject area, they can filter this grid, save the PDF, and then they've got that document ready for that discussion. So, they'd contribute in the way that we've just been doing here by clicking on here and filling this form in. Then they might click filter view.

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They might choose their subject, so for example history or science. I click apply filter and now what I've got is a history grid showing personal development across the subject area. And I can save that to PDF, there we go, got a PDF of that. So, quite a useful feature to get subject leaders onboard. Okay. Now that really is the main functionality of the Grid, it's about customising it, it's about making sure that it suits your school. It's then about engaging staff and getting them to see that it's not long, it's not a complicated tool, it's about just capturing something that's been delivered. Building this whole school picture, and then using that to demonstrate your coverage, identify gaps in provision, and hopefully prove that you are already doing some fantastic work in the school.

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I very briefly, just exit your Grid, well actually here's the grid that we were looking at earlier this one, that's the demonstration for your school. I'll exit it. And I'll just go in with the admin password, just to show you that it's not actually complicated to customise the Grid. So, we log back in, it is the same interface, but you'll just notice here now that we've got a little bit more criteria or a little bit more options for buttons. So, for example, I can click on groups, and I can tailor the groups that are in the Grid. I could add criteria or subject areas. So, I've noticed for example, on the left down here, we don't have the drama department. So, let's say you were doing an inset session or we were delivering an inset session, what we might do is click on add subject, we might put in the drama department and then now we've got a row on this for them. The other functionality allows you to change the passwords.

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Also allows you to add or hide or edit the grids that are already there. And this is where we might add, say for example, school values or academy values if you had them. We'd click add grid, it would build in another set of criteria here. We might hide some that we're not using. And I think always that's a good idea, if you're not going to use it for certain criteria, hide them on the Grid and that just kind of optimises it and focuses it on your school requirements. But in the school values, let's just say we didn't have any to start with, what we might add is add criteria, we might have things like teamwork and character and resilience. So, let's just add some of those in. And you can see all we're doing here is building a subset of criteria to use in the Grid so that when we add a project or activity, there's some of the criteria that we can tick and that will drop into the Grid and demonstrate coverage there.

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Now, alongside the Grid or GridMaker rather, we also provide another tool based on one of these based on the Abacus. Okay. And it sits alongside the Grid. Think about the Grid as your evidence base, but then think about iAbacus as your evaluation and your improvement plan. And it's based on the Abacus model. It uses a really simple process that starts by allowing you to make a judgement by sliding the bead. So, you choose an area, so let's say leadership or governance, or SMSC in the curriculum. And you slide a bead to kind of record your judgement. You look at the criteria that you base that judgement on. You look at the evidence behind that judgement. What have you got to support that judgement? Interestingly, with this tool as well you also look at the helping factors. Things that are pushing the bead in the right direction. The hindering factors, things that are pushing your beads in the wrong direction, and then what you can do about those things.

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So, it's a dynamic tool used in schools. We actually give you a site licence for GridMaker. And we give you a single user licence for iAbacus. You can extend it, but we just give you a single user licence to start you off. There are Abacuses' for whole school improvement. There are Abacuses for subject areas. You can even have an Abacus for individual teacher performance or teaching assistant performance, whatever you want to use in iAbacus for. So, let me quickly show you how it works. You start with one of the many templates that are in the system. There are some for subject leaders as I explained, but the one that we're going to use is just the Ofsted framework. Okay. Interestingly, inside the Ofsted framework, there's a judgement on personal development. Okay. So, if you are responsible for SMSC for British Values, even careers based learning, it, your work really and the effectiveness of it will sit under this judgement.

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So, let's make a judgement about where we think personal development is in the school. And we might say actually, my gut feeling is that personal development is good. Or maybe top end of good. And you put the bead on the Abacus and it gives you this improvement process, based on this original iAbacus model. So, what's the criteria that we've based this judgement on? Let's have a look. So here, we've got the Ofsted grade descriptor for personal development. And it gives us the criteria for good, but it also gives us the criteria for the other levels. So, we can just start to make an accurate judgement. And it might be actually that we look at outstanding and we say, do you know what? There's still a few areas there that we're not quite covering. Maybe we are top end of good or just into good. You put the bead to represent that judgement. You then move on in the process to evidence.

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Now in this section, what we're trying to do here is just sign post point to anything that we have that justifies that judgement. So, in this case, you might actually mention the grid. You might say, we have a grid for mapping SMSC and it shows good coverage. Okay, forgive my spelling mistakes, et cetera. You might even actually link to or attach your Grid document. Okay. That would be a good source of evidence. And what I'll do here is I will just paste in some evidence that I already have prepped for demonstrating this tool. So, bullet points, probably turn those into bullet points. If we've got any files of data or survey results or PDFs, what we would do is link to them. You've probably got them stored somewhere in the school directory.

 

You can attach them if you want to. But it's just a way of sign posting and justifying our judgement. Next, we move on to the analysis. Now this sounds technical but essentially going back to the iAbacus model, all we're really thinking about here are the things that people, the policies and the things that we've got in place that have pushed our bead in the right direction. Okay. So, we just type them on the left hand side a bit like a bullet point list, all the positive things that we've been able to do. Some of these will have made a bigger impact than others, so we can prioritise them. But on the right hand side, what are the hindering factors? What are the things that are pushing us in the wrong direction or stopping this aspect of provision being better, outstanding or excellent? So here, what we do is we just type in those hindering factors.

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Over recent months and years, there's been many that have been to do with COVID, but there'll be some that you would put in here and you might be able to prioritise them and say, actually, this thing, this process, this hindrance at the moment is really holding us back. Now, the reason we do this analysis is because it sets up our action planning. Okay. These are the things that we want to strengthen, the helping factors. And the hindering factors are the things that we want to remove, or we want to weaken. So, in our action planning, this final stage here, it will show the helps and hinders that we've diagnosed. We will be able to hide some of them. We can't prioritise everything. So, this is part of the process, is just choosing the things that we can work on. And then for those that we can actually action, we expand them and we decide what we're going to do about it.

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We just enter that into the planning strip. We think about who might be able to help us and supporters on it. What does our success criteria look like? So, we type that in. We choose a deadline. We may update the progress on this and say, actually, we're about halfway through this now, we might even put some notes in here. And towards the end of the action, it probably might be nice to actually put some evidence of impact in here. So, I'll just recap what we've done. Okay. We made a judgement about personal development. We could have been making a judgement about behaviour or something other in the school, quality of education. We make a judgement. We open that judgement up and we look at the criteria. Is it an accurate judgement? We sign post any evidence that we've already got in place. And we've here mentioned that we've got an SMSC Grid, I'll just correct that, SMSC shows coverage, brilliant.

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We then do a bit of analysis. What are the helps and hinders? And then we put together an action plan. Now a bit like the Grid, we are able at any point to export a PDF of this document. So, if I click it, and just show you what that looks like, here we've got our cover page with the Grid on it, sorry with the iAbacus on it. But behind this bead we'll have our evidence, our analysis and our action planning. So, really clear, concise, self-evaluation and action plan for whole school provision or just for personal development. Or if your subject leaders have access to the tool, they will be making improvement plans for their subject area. It might be a good way to prepare for a deep dive, is to have one of these already in place for a subject area. Finally, just a bit of functionality that you can do with iAbacus. You can demonstrate progress because you can make another judgement later down the line. And what you'll find is that it puts your old bead, your kind of previous judgement, it fades it out and puts your new judgement here.

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So, it's demonstrating your progress. Showing your improvement in certain areas, iAbacus are also collaborative. So you can share the iAbacus and ask somebody else to slide the bead, where do they think things are at? If you use it in a school where you give iAbacus to subject leaders, one of the functionality, one of the aspects of functionality that I really like, is the ability to combine or overlay the import from others. So, this iAbacus shows a whole school picture of where different subject areas are. And you look at your red beads and you'll think, who are they? Why are they struggling? What's their evidence for that judgement? What's their hindering factors? But there will be provision over here that you want to look at, and that will be kind of your exemplary provision.

What's their evidence behind that judgement? What did they do to get them to that point? What were their helping factors? So, a really simple tool. I know it's taken a while just to show the process, but actually that is pretty much the iAbacus in its entirety. Sliding beads, following the step by step process. Later on down the line, you might give it to other people so that you can access all of the insights that are contained within the iAbacus. Because don't forget every judgement is backed up with evidence analysis and action planning. So, just a quick recap, here you go. You've got your Grid, which will have your evidence base of everything that takes place that covers SMSC, British Values, physical health and mental wellbeing and all of the criteria that you want to put into it. And then we support you by giving you an iAbacus, which enables you to create really simple and straightforward evaluations and action plans.

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Both of the tools are £295 for primary, £495 for secondary. Include all the customisation, all the bespoke templates, all the bespoke criteria, plus, and this is where I think the real value comes in, all of the training and support that we deliver on Zoom and on Teams to any member of staff. So, if you want more information, please reach out to us. We can do a personalised demo for you and any of your colleagues. And all of the trials that we create for you to have a play with, with colleagues and to load onto your own computer. Any information that you enter into those trials will be retained if you decide to sign up. So, all the best and hopefully speak to you soon.