Perspective for Secondary Schools
Team based, integrated, Planning and Self Evaluation
Perspective is an online system that has benefitted from the experience, wisdom, and feedback of hundreds of school leaders and educational experts since 2006.
Version 3 of Perspective was launched in Summer 2009 and incorporates the most modern internet technology (including Microsoft.Net 3.5 and AJAX) and, using the 2009 Ofsted Framework, helps schools to capitalise on their cycle of self evaluation and planning by, for instance, identifying the causes of Within School Variation.
A school that used Perspective would have a
- Convenient, collaborative, consistent way for teams and their members to evaluate performance effectively
- Key Priorities that have the greatest potential to impact on school performance
- Source of expert advice to support and promote good self evaluation
- School wide, structured approach to strategic planning that makes sure the school's priorities are at the heart of every team's development planning
- Development/improvement plans that continuously provide an accurate, up to date, picture of progress throughout school
- Clear and demonstrable relationship between self evaluation and development/improvement planning throughout the school
- Action plans that ensure every individual is always clear about their role and responsibilities in team and school development plans.
- Simple, quick, efficient way of distributing, collecting and analysing surveys and using them as evidence to support self evaluation
- National, regional, and local data, about school context and performance for use as evidence to inform, and underpin, evaluation and planning
- Solution that is supported by a professional programme of consultancy and support, at a fair and reasonable price
All of which would help to guarantee that the school and its Departments meet challenging targets and maintain high levels of achievement.
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What's new in Version 3 for Secondary Schools
We've been working hard on the new version of Perspective for over a year and are proud to bring you the following features
Team Self Review
Perspective now has a comprehensive Team Self Review linked directly with the SEF. You can set up any number of teams, specific to your situation (for example, Departmental Teams such as Science or Geography, Subject or Phase based Teams, Behavioural Teams, etc). The scaffold provided by Perspective's unique Bite Sized Questions provides guidance and insight for middle leaders undertaking the self review process.
Collaboration
Work together with other users in your team. Work independently through a series of Bite Size Questions and then come together to compare and contrast your responses before agreeing on the outcomes.
Team Plans
Perspective now has the ability to allow you to create Development Plans for any Team. You can specify whether a Team has to complete a plan and have the agreed plans accessible to users with relevant permissions. Departments, subjects and phase based teams targets can now be monitored effectively, and integrated with the main focus areas of the wider institution.
Improved Development Plans
Perspective now allows you to choose which Targets (or Goals) you want to include within your Development Plan. Change the order in which they appear, include an introduction, conclusion. Report formatting has been enhanced plus you now have the ability to export or summary. The reports can now also be viewed in a number of common outputs including PDF and Word formats.
Enhanced Admin Section
New icon based admin section with additional screens to manage users, teams, change the language or terminology used within parts of Perspective, so you can personalise Perspective with the terms your staff are familiar with.
Enhanced Home Page
New and enhanced 'widgets' give users a dashboard interface with instant access to commonly used areas such as your SEF, Development Plans, your personalised To-Do list, and other Team Reviews.
To-Do List
A simple, personalised, day to day list of things to-do. Actions in this list simply have a title, a deadline and whether they have been completed or not. These may contribute towards targets or goals, or might simply be reminders about your day-to-day activities.
Draft and Agreed SEF Versions
Perspective now provides you with the ability to have a work in progress SEF and a final agreed SEF, providing more scope for you to edit and manage the SEF on an ongoing basis, without losing your original text.
Language Preferences
You say Tomato I say Tomato... Perspective now allows you to personalise various terms used throughout the system, on screen and in reports. If you prefer School Development Plan rather than School Improvement Plan, no problem. Simply change the default term and this will be reflected throughout Perspective.
Enhanced User and Team Management
Enhanced functionality when creating users, plus, a wholly new feature, is the ability to create teams and assign individual or multiple users to a team. Work with permissions; decide whether individual users are required to complete a thorough or 'lite' review, or whether they are the leader of their Team.
Enhanced websites tab
The much loved websites tab has had additional websites added to it to give you further relevant sources to help evidence your evaluation. You can now access DCSF Performance Tables, Neighbourhood Statistics and your latest Ofsted reports where relevant, and use the information within Perspective.
Targets and Actions
In Version 2 we had the concept of Actions which could be broken down into Tasks. To support the best practice of having Targets (or Goals) identified as a result of working through your evaluation processes, Perspective now has Targets, which support multiple success criteria, and Actions which can belong to a Target. Each Action can also have costs and/or staff time associated to it. These can be added together to give visibility at an overarching target level.
Notes
New in Perspective v3 is the ability to allow users within your team to add their comments, or notes, on your finalised text in your self review evaluation. You may want to invite a 'critical friend' to make suggestions and provide thoughts on your current text, without giving them the facility to edit your hard work!
