Enabling The Delivery Of Performance Information To Schools Via The Web

HM Inspectorate of Education (HMIE) in Scotland is part of the Scottish Government, and is responsible for performing rigorous and independent inspections and reviews of schools and other educational establishments.  Its mission is to "promote improvements in standards, quality and attainment in Scottish education through first hand, independent evaluation."

Prior to an inspection of a secondary school, HMIE produces a pre-inspection secondary support pack (PSSP).  This contains background information on the school, examination result statistics, comparisons against schools that have a similar free meal entitlement, and summary statements of key measures.  Each pack is printed and distributed to both the inspection team and the school, and takes several days to produce.

Business Drivers

The National Priorities in Education were approved by the Scottish Parliament in December 2000, and set a number of target outcomes for improvements in educational standards.  The information contained in the PSSPs could provide invaluable support to schools in the target-setting process.  However, PSSPs were only produced for schools scheduled for an inspection.  As production of each pack involved a laborious manual process taking several days, producing packs for all 500 secondary schools in Scotland using the same means was out of the question.

Solution

Sopra Group offered HMIE a best value approach to automate the production of the PSSPs.  The solution maximised the re-use potential of the existing systems and involved close application integration of SAS with Excel across UNIX and Windows operating systems.  It provides a new user-interface to allow staff to quickly and easily generate support packs.  The resultant production time is now reduced to minutes.

The PSSPs are placed on HMIE's website, enabling schools and other stakeholders to obtain their support packs as and when required.  This has eliminated costly production and distribution overheads.

Sopra Group also provided knowledge transfer to enable HMIE to adopt and maintain the system internally.  The overall solution has enabled HMIE to efficiently generate reports, while minimising the cost impact of the changes in terms of re-training and ongoing support and maintenance.

Key Benefits

The system developed by Sopra Group provides a number of benefits to HMIE, including:

• Improved efficiency reducing the generation and distribution time of PSSPs from several days to just a few minutes.
• Enhanced access, all secondary schools local authorities and inspectors can now access PSSPs via the web.
• Best value for money through the re-use of existing tools and systems, reducing re-training and support and maintenance costs.

The Future

The new system was launched across all the secondary schools and education authorities in September 2003.  The Scottish Government believes that the availability of support packs will help secondary schools to target their initiatives for improvement against the National Standards in Education, allowing them to raise standards and continually improve the education of pupils.

Consideration is also being given to the provision of support packs for primary schools.  Sopra Group will continue to work with HMIE to implement further enhancements to the system.