No more flipping coins – it’s time to trust the iAbacus

At iAbacus we’ve always known that school improvement begins and ends with what teachers think and do. So, we’ve always worked alongside you and your staff. We didn’t stand over you hectoring you about what you could have done, or should be doing. We’ve always put Professional Development at the heart of School Improvement and placed School Administration back in the box and marked it, “For Reference”.

We watched as Performance Tables, the old SEF and School Admin Systems encouraged your Senior Leaders to focus on evidence collection and data analysis. We saw you bewildered and bored with data mountains. We watched as other Improvement Systems tried to capture what you had achieved and became bloated, electronic filing cabinets, stuffed with your evidence. Of course, we know results and data are crucial indicators but we winced and waited as you were, paralysed by increasingly sophisticated analysis, stuck in retrospective quality control, unable to move onto the quality assurance of development planning. We also knew, as you did, that schools are about far more than academic achievement, represented by jiggling numbers on complex graphs.

Now, we are celebrating with you as Ofsted inspectors pocket their flipping coins and want to validate your self-evaluation. Do you sense the culture is changing too? We are delighted that your context, the professionals’ perspective, is to be, once again, the starting point for school improvement. It’s going to be about what you plan to be doing tomorrow and the next day as well as what you did last year. Some are describing this as innovative, unique, even radical. It has always been common sense to us. It’s about learning – it’s what we do. That’s why we spent all those years perfecting one powerful process, matched by our deceptively simple software. We call it the iAbacus and it’s here to help you to plan your school’s improvement. Are you prepared for the challenge of relying on your own judgement?

Your colleagues are loving iAbacus. They say it’s innovative and unique because:

• iAbacus begins with the thinking and context of the Headteacher and staff in school – they tell us other systems delay them by starting with data, or what others are demanding

• it’s deceptively simple and intuitive to use – they say it’s kinaesthetic, visually attractive, uncluttered and powerful

• iAbacus focuses on doing more than describing – they see it scaffolds self-evaluation and effortlessly moves them to analysis and then produces detailed action plans for them.

• it’s founded on proven school improvement and learning research – they feel it’s emotionally intelligent software built on validated self-evaluation, coaching and sustainable school improvement processes

• iAbacus is low disturbance and universal – they like not having to re-enter their data. They say it augments and eases references to their existing Administration Systems

• it ensures staff make good judgements using agreed criteria – they are confident as it structures access to more detailed national criteria than any other system on the market

• iAbacus encourages collaborative working – they say it gives them a common process, a common language and a common vision for their school’s improvement

Remember, the iAbacus starts simple and guides you through the intricacies of school improvement. Other systems start complicated and you don’t stand a chance.

Try the iAbacus for yourself: see how it works, where it works and why it works – go on play with it – you can’t break it….