At St Benedict’s, we used to have card-based systems for logging merits and behaviour concerns which tutors would have to painstakingly input into Excel spreadsheets at the end of each week. Filing cabinets full of cards made it very difficult to derive useful data that could inform how we could ensure that we could promote good behaviour and also reduce poor behaviour.
Several years ago, we digitised our safeguarding processes by using MyConcern which made it far easier to log safeguarding information and share it among our staff. More recently, we have also been able to digitise our behaviour management, rewards system, incidents, detentions, and behaviour tracking into one easy-to-use platform using Trackit Lights.
The beauty of Trackit Lights is that it integrates with many other systems including SIMS and MyConcern which means that a teacher can log a merit or behaviour concern in a couple of clicks on the board in class, and it will instantly log it into SIMS, and for particularly significant issues it can automatically send a pre-populated incident form into MyConcern. Once behaviour is logged into SIMS, it is also automatically sent into our parent comms system (Firefly) which allows parents to see a dashboard overview of how their children are doing.
Being able to log both safeguarding and behaviour issues digitally has reduced teacher workload and improved our ability to manage these issues quickly and track them robustly. Teachers can look at numbers of merits achieved by students in their class, Heads of Year can quickly pick out students who are not behaving well, and as a Senior Team we can get a picture across the school about when and where poor behaviour is happening (and of what sort!). This allows us to address these issues quickly and also in the longer term to target recurring problems so that we can minimise them in future.
Having said that, around 90% of the points awarded on Trackit Lights are for positive reasons, and we have also found ourselves giving more rewards than ever to recognise the hard work and good behaviour of our students which is now being recorded far more effectively.