'From COS, independant magazine for modern education and ict.'

‘More and more larger schools belong to larger boards, they have lumpsum financing and need to decide on their own about how to use their goods. Besides, they get more and more external questions about the quality of their education’, so says Jaap Minnema, quality advisor of Leervisie ICT. This agency supports schools with working on integral quality, at which the Bizzscore software offers technological support. Integral quality? ‘As a school organization it is about seeking the tuning between working on cases as edcucation development, staff policy, satisfaction of parents and student and the financial health of the school. That is not easy. There are a lot of events and activities which influence the state of affairs within a school. To know how you are doing and where you are going, you can collect hundreds of numbers. But it keeps questionable if these numbers give the correct view.’

Success factors
In the method of Minnema getting grip on that complex information is the center point. ‘That is done by gradually translating your goals to a workable number of measurable indicators. We call them the KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators). A large part of those will count for all schools within the board. But schools can, based on their own identity, also partly mutually deviate. The own identity of a school stays visible in this. On ten to twenty of those indicators you can steer, on hundred numbers you can’t. It is about to determine on which concrete things you can see if things are going good with the school. A simple example is the intended average Cito-score of your students, or a percentage of the students which scores A- or B-level on language and calculating. That is easy to measure. But also softer goals can be made measurable. When your school wants to shape adaptive education, you can set what competences teachers need for that. An indicator can be striving for eighty percent of the teachers controlling the concerning competenced on level 3 or 4. Or you plan and budget from the schoolplan ten projects concerning the implementation of adaptive education. An indicator can be how many projects are succesful and will be finished on time.”

Motivating
It is not about controlling the prestations of individual teachers in the system, underlines Minnema. ‘Nobody want Big Brother-situations. Showing the quality of the school, is meant to motivate the empoyees to put their shoulders under it together by showing the trends within the entire organization. At implementing the system, creating a solid basis plays an important part. Together -often in a project team- you define which indicators are important to follow. Moreover the tuning with the control plans of the upperschool board plays an important part and the autonomy which you get as a school to gain the arranged goals on your own way. With good information about jointly setted indicators, you offer all employees support to take part in the conversation about the state of affairs. For example, teachers can be thorough critical if there is spoken about working in result responsible teams in the school development plan, while the indicators show that they don’t get enough space for that.’

Dashboard
The following of the progress and trends in the method of Minnema is done with the programm Bizzscore, which is available since 1994. ‘The user gets a view of a webbased dashboard with a number of gauges. It is similar to a cockpit, a visual presentation in which you can see numbers and trends in time, if necessary related to a benchmark, for example how your school scores on a specific aspect in comparison to other schools within the board. The system can also indicate cross relations which tell something about the link between what happens within the school. The software imports information for that from several digital sources, such as a student following system, a data file of the absence through illness or an Excel file. The dashboard can be adjusted for several goals, such as a management delibaration or a teachers meeting. The idea is to leave non-relevant information and offer the party involved as many practical information as possible in only one glance.

Signalling
The dashboard gives the professionals in the school a continu insight in the development of the quality of the school. ‘Signaling quickly is correcting quickly’, is the creed with that. Bizzscore and the preceding path gives a grip on a sometimes difficult to understand notion as integral quality. Besides the method matches with the dynamic which is inherent to quality care. Schools can adjust their goals and matching indicators constantly based on trends or because there are new external questions.