The National Governance Association’s guidance stresses that good school governance involves leaders and governors working together to set a strategy, use self-evaluation to identify priorities and monitor progress within an annual cycle.

ImpactEd Evaluation supports schools in this process though:

• Defining improvement priorities based on reliable evidence, using the School Impact Platform to identify common challenges across outcomes such as attainment, wellbeing or attendance. 
• Simplifying reporting: all schools working with us receive an annual impact report summarising evidence from their evaluations that can be shared with governors
• Providing external quality assurance, through data analysis and reporting taking place with the support of an independent third party, that supports schools to act on their findings

This helps schools ensure that governance conversations can focus on the actions needed to address priorities, rather than creating additional data or workload.

Toby Sutherland, Headteacher:

“For us the exciting thing about ImpactEd Evaluation has been not just about evaluating the impact of specific projects, but beginning to embed this way of thinking in our school more broadly. 

We only want teachers to be spending their time on the things that are the highest impact, and so working with ImpactEd Evaluation has helped provide us with a framework for, before we start doing anything, being really rigorous about what we are trying to achieve, how we'll know if we have achieved it, and what we will do as a result”

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A learning culture around impact measurement

We have worked with St Clement Danes School for over four years, and our work has since expanded to include the entirety of the Danes Educational Trust.

St Clement Danes work with ImpactEd Evaluation across three different areas, all of which are reported to governors at least annually:

1. Acting on major whole-school priorities - for example, the school participated in our national research on the relationship between literacy and wellbeing, using this to identify barriers to student’s reading
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2. Identify the impact of external interventions - this helps the school assess and report to governors on value for money of external interventions such as The Brilliant Club, National Tutoring Programme, and nurture groups
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3. ‍Teacher development and action research - many of these evaluations are embedded in the school’s Educator Led Development programme, working as part of the school’s professional development offer

Usage of the School Impact Platform has helped create a focus on impact and simplify reporting. For example, evaluation of a school-based study leave programme, providing intensive study support for Year 11 students, showed disappointing results initially. ImpactEd Evaluation's provided a set of recommendations that were shared with governors directly as a paper. This discussion was then used to revise programme delivery. In the second year of the programme, this led to a greater number of statistically significant improvements, particularly on student’s attitudes towards tests. It continues to be evaluated year on year as part of an annual improvement cycle.

As with their other programmes, St Clement Danes can now use this data to show confidence in the impact they are making, and test new initiatives when they are piloted.