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"Using keypoint opens up a whole variety of areas where we can become far more responsive to our students, their families and our local community."

Keith Norman, Deputy Headteacher, Shoeburyness High School

Overview of Shoeburyness High School

We are a community 11-18 mixed secondary school of 1560 pupils and nearly 200 teaching and associate staff. We serve a very diverse local community. We became a Technology college in 1999 and have recently been designated a Full Service Extended School. This confirms the role that we have played for many years as a focal point for the locality. We work hard to provide a high quality of educational opportunity for our students through supporting the wider activities and needs of the whole neighbourhood.

Problem Needing Addressing

Our prime reason for purchasing Keypoint was to address the requirement for a needs analysis to be undertaken as part of the process of us becoming a Full Service Extended School. Anecdotal evidence about the needs of the community was not good enough and we needed a more authentic evidence base from which to work. This has been able to provide a sound, confident base for planning new initiatives and services to our neighbourhood.

Why Keypoint?

Our first step was to undertake an internet survey of software that could assist us with surveys and their analysis. After exploring a number of options we felt that Keypoint provided the best solution for a number of reasons. First, being able to scan results in, rather than only being able to use a manual input method was very attractive. Having not used the technology before, we thought that the approach of using a duplex multi-sheet scanner could be fraught with problems. How wrong could we be?! To date we have been very impressed by the totally problem free accuracy of operation.

It was considered very important to have software that combined the design, reading and analysis of surveys, rather than needing to switch between various different applications. Equally, to allow more sophisticated analysis in some uses, it was vital to have a smooth export method, which Keypoint provides.

Clearly value for money is of major consideration given the limited budgets that schools have. Comparison with similar packages tended to indicate that Keypoint provided a great deal more than any competitor.

Other benefits of the Keypoint software, to extend to e-mail and web based surveys was an attraction for future exploration.

How Has Keypoint Helped Address the Problem?

If anything, Keypoint has exceeded our hopes in terms of the quality of the work that it can do. The software is user friendly and, with only a little induction, it has proved quite easy to use. Too often complex analysis packages result in important key findings being missed – not being able to “see the wood for the trees”. We consider that the level of analysis provided within the Keypoint package is ideal and provides a very clear graphical summary report. Deeper analysis is always possible through exporting.

In addition the assurance that there is technical advice available from Cambridge Software Publishing provides security. In fact, the quality of the personalised support that we have been given has been exemplary. However foolish our questions may appear, or how intractable the problem may have been, we have always been met with a most effective, speedy and courteous response. Though the quality of this service does not become evident until after purchase, it has certainly confirmed to us that we made the right decision in choosing to use Keypoint.

Major Successes Resulting from Keypoint

An Extended School is one that provides a range of services and activities often beyond the school day to help meet the needs and wishes of its pupils, their families and the wider community. Our needs analysis consisted of over 3,000 Parent and Community Surveys, which were conducted using Keypoint. Analysing this amount of data manually would have been, quite probably, an impossible task for us to complete. As it was we have been able to successfully complete the analysis in record time!

Many schools, particularly those who are becoming Extended Schools, are having major problems with questionnaires and surveys. We have had a number of contacts who have been very interested in our innovative approach. We have also already used this application for Parent Surveys at our Year 9 and Sixth Form Parents’ Consultation Evenings.

Gaining and considering the views and opinions of stakeholders is always important to schools and has become a lot more significant under the examination of the new Ofsted inspection framework. This can be speedily addressed, used to inform school developments and fed back to parents very effectively with the help of Keypoint.

Each application of Keypoint has proved very successful. It has provided a very effective way of setting up questionnaires, a speedy way of collating data and a most appropriate method of display and analysis of results. After we had some initial installation teething problems, which were very efficiently supported by Cambridge Software Publishing technical team, we have found the software very user friendly.

Plans for Keypoint in the Future

We are extending the Parents’ Evening Surveys to all year groups and will maintain the same question bank to allow us to make year on year comparisons our how we have improved. This will help us make use of stakeholder feedback as part of a natural cycle of evaluation – often the weakest point in any development programme.

We also plan to look at how we could use sheets produced by Keypoint to collate pupil assessment data for whole school analysis. Though more specialist analysis tools will be used, Keypoint – we feel – will be very efficient at collecting data from a wide number of classroom teachers and combining it ready for export.

We feel sure that, as we gain confidence in using Keypoint, that there will be many more educational examples of how it can be used. For example, we have not yet begun to consider how pupils could use of the software; either for project work or, actively in class by making use of a multi-user licence and live input of data. Class surveys very easily can become a simple process with near immediate results, enhancing learning rather than generating a vast amount of paper and data transfer work with the end result being some time away from when the data was collected.

It is always important to see how we have made progress. Using surveys on a regular basis is an important way of monitoring this. Traditionally this has always been rather unwieldy. Using Keypoint opens up a whole variety of areas where we can become far more responsive to our students, their families and our local community.