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When a Head Teacher in Leeds first wanted to track pupils against the new-fangled “National Curriculum”,
he designed paper tick-sheets for his teachers and scanned them onto piles of floppy disks. Today, those
same teachers, and thousands of others, use broadband to connect to a state-of-the-art, web-based system
running on a rack of unimaginably powerful servers—and yet the original insight still stands.
First: take a framework like the National Curriculum; break it down into smaller steps; organize them by
theme and skill; and make it very easy for teachers to track exactly what each pupil has learned. Then
trust these teachers’ assessments: use them for planning and targeting and make sure every child is
always challenged at the right level in every area of every subject. And re-use this data, as many times
as possible, so that non-teaching tasks like end-of-year reports take as little time as possible.
“Incerts has enabled us to give status to teacher assessment, and this has contributed to a significant rise in standards.”
Brendan Doherty,
Head Teacher,
Pearl Hyde Primary School, Coventry.
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Since it’s always been web-based, teachers have used Incerts from different machines around the school,
without worrying about copying data between machines or synchronizing their work with that of others.
Sometime during 2007, broadband reached more than half of all UK households and the possibilities of a
web-based progress tracking expanded again. Parents are important stakeholders in their children’s
learning: can we show them, not just at the end of the year, where progress is being made? What about
the children themselves: can they “own” their own learning targets?
“All children … have the right to receive support and challenge, tailored to their needs, interests and abilities. This demands active commitment from pupils, responsiveness from teachers and engagement from parents.”
Christine Gilbert CBE,
Chief Inspector of Schools,
in "2020 Vision".
Incerts Education exists to run the Incerts software system, to support its users and to accelerate
its development. By doing so, we can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of learning and teaching
in the UK.
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