ASCL magazine features iAbacus
We are delighted that Andrew Clay, Head of Counden Court School in Coventry, was featured in the Association of School and College Leaders’ (ASCL’s) magazine, Leader, talking about how they use iAbacus with middle leaders.
In the ASCL article, Andrew explains how senior leaders at Counden Court use iAbacus to develop critical thinking and evaluation skills in their middle leaders and to produce effective departmental improvement plans.
Andrew explains in the article: “The (iAbacus) model helps to sharpen thinking, and the process lends itself to quick and straightforward moderation of middle leader understanding. Can a department head or a deputy headteacher sum up neatly where their area is currently and what needs to change?
“Going through the process helps to get our senior and middle leaders to that point of clear insight.
“Finally, I would stress the importance of conversation and real collaboration in all of this. Having the iAbacus software to guide evaluation and planning is useful but does not replace the need for dialogue and face-to-face challenge and support.
“What it does is to strengthen the focus of face-to-face dialogue and scaffold a way forward. It enables leaders at all levels to frame a conversation that challenges in a rigorous and objective way. This is its real value.”
We agree completely. iAbacus is unlike other education software products that simply store and output data into pie charts and graphs.
The benefit of iAbacus is that it shows the human insight behind judgements on performance and enables conversations about the robustness of those judgments and the ‘why’ behind the data.
iAbacus then guides users through the development of strategies to address the issues and provides a process to monitor progress.
We like to think of iAbacus as providing quality assurance through human insight, rather than just quality control through data. We hope you do too.
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