Services
At Ponder we believe in embedding within schools to understand problems and develop solutions collaboratively from the classroom to the senior leadership team. We work with school network leadership, teaching, operational and technical teams to understand pain points, design solutions and implement them, either independent of or alongside network staff. Below are a series of ways we've worked with leaders in the past. Let us know what is top of mind of you and your colleagues.
Infrastructure Mini-Projects
Service 01
Schools Performance Dashboard
REsearch questions
What are leading indicators telling us about the impact of our school system strategy? How are we ensuring we are measuring the right indicators, at the right time, with full confidence to make adjustments?
key services
We all know that developing staff is critical to running great schools, but the impact of a specific programme is notoriously murky. Want to know the impact that Steplab Drop-ins are having on the satisfaction of your ECTs, or the maths attainment of your year 7 pupils? Use Ponder DWE (Data Warehouse for Education) to connect and integrate data from multiple sources to get a clear picture of the impact of your programme.
Technical details
Service 02
Instructional Coaching Impact
REsearch questions
What impact is our trust's instructional coaching programme having on our broader strategy?
key services
We all know that developing staff is critical to running great schools, but the impact of a specific programme is notoriously murky. Want to know the impact that Steplab Drop-ins are having on the satisfaction of your ECTs, or the maths attainment of your year 7 pupils? Use Ponder DWE (Data Warehouse for Education) to connect and integrate data from multiple sources to get a clear picture of the impact of your programme.
Technical details
Service 03
Attendance (Monitoring and Response) Intervention System
REsearch questions
How do we ensure our staff are minimising time reporting attendance and instead unblocking the practical and psychosocial causes of chronically absent pupils?
key services
Safety, belonging, and learning are all compromised when pupils are chronically absent. The root causes are complex, ranging from practical issues like transport to deeper issues of belonging at school. Integrating pupil attendance data into core trust-wide processes ensures the right stakeholder is providing the right solution before it's too late.
Technical details
Service 04
Exclusion Policy Monitoring
REsearch questions
How is our exclusion policy being implemented at schools across the trust, and what is the impact on our most vulnerable pupils?
key services
Exclusionary discipline is a top priority for any school and trust leader, and yet time, confidence, and resources to monitor, address, respond, and prevent future exclusions are all in short supply. Use Ponder DWE (Data Warehouse for Education) to ensure reporting allows strategic collaboration based on timely and accurate data.
Technical details
Service 05
Technical Infrastructure Evaluation
REsearch questions
How does the trust’s current data capabilities align with comparably sized school networks? Where are dependencies on vendor data obstructing mission-critical insights?
key services
Most trusts fall into one of two categories: They work incessantly and likely unsustainably across a broad swathe of systems to keep them synchronised and maintain data quality; or they stop asking mission critical questions because those questions are simply too hard to answer across their broad swathe of systems. Ponder’s process gives school systems the confidence that they are aligning on the highest leverage systems and processes, while leaving schools to lead where their expertise is most needed.
Focus Areas
Ponder’s Technical Infrastructure Evaluation guides Trusts to evaluate the following characteristics of healthy data ecosystems to determine where trust infrastructure is supporting strategy, and where investment will have the greatest impact:
- Data interoperability
- Data governance and quality
- Data privacy and security
- Data usability and accessibility
- Infrastructure scalability and sustainability
Strategic Planning
Infrastructure Scale Assessment
How far can your current infrastructure stretch and scale as your trust and/or associated goals grow? What are the highest priority bottlenecks, what order should they be addressed in, and on what schedule?
Long-term sustainable pupil attainment lift
When you look 5-10 years ahead for your trust, what level of student achievement do you hope to reach? Where will you focus your and your staff's energies to reach those goals? How will you measure your progress towards them?
Repeatable Rebrokering Systems Plan
Rebrokering a school into your trust is a complex, multi-threaded, multi-step process, and never an exact replica of a previous effort. That doesn't mean, however, that each effort needs to be a reinvention of the process. Each rebrokered school will need a custom set of processes to move it from its present state to operating natively within your trust. Pick the relevant ones from a menu of re-usable recipes and tools.
How Do We Get Started?
Fit Check
1 hour call with Trust leadership and Ponder
A fast, structured assessment to understand your desired outcomes and confirm technical compatibility. You leave with a clear picture of how your school system can drive strategy forward with Ponder.
Deliverable/Artifact
- Organisational Readiness
- Assessment/Report (with recommendations)
Partnership Assessment
1 day of Ponder, 1 day of Trust time
Technical Assessment (State of Infrastructure) and Full-Vertical Capacity (School to Leadership) to pilot change
Deliverable/Artifact
- Infrastructure architecture diagram
- Existing services
- Data Flow map
- Future State Recommendation
- Staffing Assessment
- Leadership Capacity (Trust and School)
- Technical Capacity
- Operational Capacity