Services
At Ponder we believe in embedding within schools to understand problems and develop solutions collaboratively from the classroom to the executive team. We work with school network leadership, instructional, operational and technical teams 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 stop 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 trust strategy? How are we ensuring we are measuring the right indicators, at the right time, with full confidence to make adjustments?
key services
DWE allows your school system to centralize raw data from all of your critical systems (attendance, behavior, family communications, state test proficiency predictions, etc) join those data sets, aggregate raw data into representative statistical measures providing leading indicators to to compare across schools. We’ll work with you to operationalize the data you need at your fingertips to drive network-level decision-making.
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 DWE to connect and integrate data from multiple sources to get a clear picture of the impact of your programme.
Technical details
Service 03
Instructional Coaching Measurement
REsearch questions
How do we ensure our staff are minimizing 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 students 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 trustwide processes ensures the right stakeholder is providing the right solution before it's too late.
Technical details
Service 04
Exclusion Monitoring
REsearch questions
How is our exclusion policy being implemented at schools across the trust, and what is the impact on our most vulnerable students?
key services
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
Technical details
Service 05
Technical Infrastructure Evaluation
REsearch questions
How does the MAT’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 swath of systems to keep them synchronized and maintain data quality; or they stop asking mission critical questions because those questions are simply too hard to answer across their broad swath of systems. Ponder’s process gives trusts 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
What are the bottlenecks of your existing operations? How can you appropriately size infrastructure to your needs? What manual systems can be cheaply and effectively automated? In what order should aging systems be mothballed, updated or replaced?
Long-term sustainable student achievement lift plan
Producing consistently excellent student outcomes requires mature, repeatable systems supported by robust infrastructure. Evolving your organization from where it is now to where it needs to be will a careful plan with flexibility for responsive, iterative change.
Repeatable Rebrokering Systems Plan
The process of incorporating an existing school into an existing school system is a complex choreography of technical and human migration and change management. We can work with you to identify challenges, then develop and implement a plan.
How Do We Get Started?
Fit Check
1 hour call with MAT 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 trust can drive strategy forward with Ponder.
Deliverable/Artifact
- Organizational Readiness
- Assessment/Report (with recommendations)
Partnership Assessment
1 day of Ponder, 1 day of MAT 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