Craigmount High School is a comprehensive, non-denominational school located in north-west Edinburgh. The school has a school roll of approximately 1,350 pupils. Most young people live in Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation deciles 7 to 10. 39% of young people have additional support needs.

Craigmount High School offers a broad range of courses across the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework, including links with the local college and industry partners. Uptake for Higher and Advanced Higher courses is high in a wide range of subjects. In addition, all pupils undertake achievement, leadership and volunteering opportunities, which helps to develop skills for learning, life and work. In 2023, 98.8% of leavers successfully progressed to a positive destination.

The improvement issue

Senior leaders recognised the need to develop staff data literacy across the school. They wanted to improve approaches to tracking and monitoring, with a focus on improved outcomes for all young people. This needed to be supported by high quality professional learning to ensure that all staff felt equipped to interpret data and use it meaningfully to identify and support learners.

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, senior leaders identified young people’s attendance as an area for improvement. Staff needed to better understand young people’s barriers to maintaining regular attendance at school. Senior leaders required improved systems to look at attendance over time to help identify and inform appropriate and well-planned interventions to support improvement.

Staff recognised the benefit of improved attainment tracking over a five-year period. They identified that through rigorous tracking at a faculty and whole-school level interventions had the potential to improve attainment.

What Craigmount High School did

Senior leaders created a middle leadership post to focus on data literacy. The post was responsible for implementing improved tracking and monitoring systems to meet the objectives set out above.

An ‘Every Day Counts’ approach has been adopted across the learning community to help ensure an agreed and shared process for promoting and monitoring attendance. This includes consistent messaging to young people, parents are carers about the impact of attendance, monthly communication with home sharing attendance statistics, agreed attendance interventions across the learning community and a common approach to tracking attendance.

The approach used allows for robust discussions about attendance and informs appropriate interventions used by staff in each school. It also provides important data for the learning community pupil support officer, who supports improved attendance for targeted children and young people. The approach also ensures that there is consistency in the experience for families from the learning community. They appreciate the common approach and clarity of expectations from across the schools.

Through improved tracking and monitoring of young people’s progress and attainment, particularly in the senior phase, staff are identifying areas of concern timeously. They use information successfully to target and monitor support and interventions as required. This includes an extensive range of support within the classroom and across the school. Importantly, data is used rigorously to review the progress of individuals and cohorts of young people. It is used to evaluate interventions to determine which approaches are leading to positive outcomes for learners. This data is analysed as part of departmental reviews, year team discussions and senior leadership meetings. Progress is also discussed across the learning community to help identify trends and promote robust discussions about assessment judgements.

Staff have introduced tracking systems to review young people’s achievements, both in and out of school. Staff use this data to identify any young people who are not participating in achievement opportunities. They then work closely with young people and families to target those requiring further opportunities for success.

What the sustained impact has been

The improved systems to gather data relating to young people’s attendance, attainment and achievements have supported staff to better understand the barriers and challenges experienced by young people. Importantly, this helped all members of the school community to understand their clearly defined role and responsibilities in using data to inform and improve practice and contribute to a focus on improvement. This includes teachers, middle and senior leaders, and extends to colleagues across the learning community. This approach is ensuring that data is collected for children and young people from early years through to senior phase. All staff now work collaboratively to identify and address potential barriers to success.

Attendance

As a result of a focus on attendance across the learning community, staff and schools have adopted common approaches which support improvement. In Craigmount High School, current data demonstrates improvements in the attendance of four out of six-year groups when compared to previous years. It has also supported improvements in the overall whole school attendance data. The pupil support officer is working with groups of families and young people and is improving outcomes for targeted young people.

Attainment

Teachers have a greater understanding of the interventions they can use within the classroom to support improvements and can evidence the impact of approaches over time. There is evidence of the positive outcomes of interventions being used by curriculum leaders, year teams, and senior leaders. Most staff report that their data literacy has improved. They can now use the data more effectively to plan appropriate interventions for the young people in their classes. As a result, the school is now seeing improvements in its overall attainment data.

Achievement

Staff now have a clear overview of young people’s achievements in school as well as their involvement in clubs, activities and excursions. Staff better understand the impact of young peoples’ achievements outside of school. Pupil Support Leaders are using this information to support targeted discussions with young people who are not developing the appropriate skills by involvement in achievement opportunities. Staff are developing bespoke and targeted achievement opportunities for these young people to address these gaps.

Almost all staff report that they feel more confident in the use of data to support their practice. They demonstrate real enthusiasm for using data to improve their practice and in turn improve outcomes for all learners.