Recording Data while delivering in Schools
There are a number of organisations that use Upshot and deliver all, most or some of their work in schools, either as part of the curriculum or as extra-curricular opportunities for students.
We have identified a set of recurring challenges organisations face around data collection in a school settings.
This is a guide with some practical and system-specific ideas on how data can be captured within a school setting to understand impact and reach without capturing personal details if they are not readily available.
This guide will cover:
Note: This guide is based on common issues and solutions that we have found to work well in the past. It is still important to communicate with specific institutions on how you are intending to record data from your sessions.
Head Counts
Sessions in Upshot can be recorded as Head Counts instead of registers. A Head Count allows you to record the number of people who attended rather than exactly who. Head counts can be broken down further by the Upshot default fields (gender, age range) or by Custom Head Count Fields. These Custom Head Count fields will allow you to break down the Total Number of attendees by criteria of your choosing, such as other demographics or other criteria.
Collecting Head Count data will allow you to collect attendances at your sessions but not the number of unique attendees (that is done via registers). For example, the same individual may be counted in multiple Head Counts and therefore count as multiple attendances. This is an important consideration when deciding whether to record a session as a traditional register or a Head Count.
Examples of Custom head count fields could include "Pupil Premium” or “Ethnicity” splits. This would allow the session registrar to note down how many people of a certain ethnicity, or how many people are Pupil Premium are present at the session.
Another example could be to create a field labelled “Year Group”. This will allow you to understand the year groups – and rough ages - of the attendees without having to collect date of births from everyone.
Another use of Custom head count fields could be to create a field labelled "New/returning participants". While this won’t always be an exact source of truth it would go some way to determining how many unique attendees (those marked as 'New' rather than 'Returning') you have engaged in any given session or groups of sessions across any time period. This would be set up as a single choice dropdown field.
Head counts can be reported on in a few different ways on the system, namely the Statistics and Attendance Reports, as well as Measured Indicators, more about this can be found here.
Locations
In some cases, when collecting either register or head count data about school-based sessions it is not possible to collect the exact addresses and postcodes of all students.
Working with the idea that UK schools use catchment areas, it can be assumed that the postcode of the school itself is relevant to most students that attend that particular school. For this reason, the location of the school itself could be used to report on the geographical communities, and indices of multiple deprivation (IMD) that are being reached. This can be done via the Statistics report, or the Mapping tool. Further information on reporting on location’s postcodes can be found here.
While it might not provide precisely accurate data, it will provide some insight into geographical information, particularly IMD data,that can be useful in reporting back to stakeholders.
In cases in which organisations are able to collect a small amount of data for each participant (e.g. name, year group etc), and want to create a profile for the pupils to record registers instead of head counts, it might also be worth recording the school’s postcode on each profile to give some indication as to where they are from, using the logic that pupils live within the school “catchment area”. Organisations may also want to record the 'school' on each profile, if so, the easiest way to do this is to use the Upshot default 'Educational Establishment' field, which is also linked to Edubase. A System Admin can make this available via Admin > Data display options.
It is also important to highlight that every one of these sessions will have been recorded against a Location within Upshot. If the school has been added using the default 'Choose a school, college or university in England or Wales' option this will mean that, alongside other information such as address, postcode and IMD %, the 'Edubase URN' is included in the export of locations, via Admin > Edit Locations, more on this and reporting on locations here.
Surveys
The Public Survey feature can provide a good option for getting feedback/responses in an anonymous way from the attendees that are engaged at these sessions.
Public surveys create a URL link that can be distributed or turned into a QR code (via free tools available online) that could be used to collect responses from the session. Or if responses are collected on paper forms could be added via the link by yourselves later.
Alternatively, if it is not possible to receive any responses directly from the attendees themselves in any format organisations could look to create a survey that is completed by the 'session leader', 'teacher' or another 'staff member' in a format that allows responses to be aggregated.
This can be done via a question type known as Count.
The premise of count questions, in this example, is that a group of people could be asked several questions, and then record how many of them gave a particular response, rather than what each person responded. E.g. “Please raise your hand if you know a lot about healthy eating” – then a record is made by the session leader of how many hands were raised.
This could even be configured using as a PRE & POST method, where a baseline is taken at the start of a session is then compared to a follow-up of the same questions at the end of the session, or just using a POST survey to provide feedback at the end of a session/cohort of delivery.
Again, creating this survey as a Public Survey with a URL link would allow someone who does not have direct access to Upshot, such as a teacher, to complete this too.
Upshot GDPR documents and FAQ's
Sometimes, when personal data is being captured in a school-setting, the school themselves require reassurance that Upshot is a secure and safe system to store data. We understand the importance of data security and can support to help alleviate concerns. We have our Technical FAQ's that can prove helpful in these situations but if additional information is required around data and system security, please do contact support@upshot.org.uk and we can help you address any concerns. Previously, we have also helped draft letters for organisations to give to schools around data protection and our data processing.