Having had SchoolIP running for a couple of months I thought I'd share some of our experience in starting out with the SEF Builder and where we are going next.

We loaded in our old SEF as a reference so there was something in each section to base the new SEF on and made sure that the latest advice that we wanted to give was loaded in.

Then we sat down to decide who was going to manage each section of the SEF. We gave these people logins and responsibility to update their sections. We said that other people could contribute to their sections and gave access to those people as the need arose adding them to groups.

This created three tiers, firstly, final approvers; myself, our Academy Principal and the Executive Principal of our two Academies. Below this people with responsibility for sections (usually senior managers) and below that other contributors such as our pastoral staff and community workers.

Quality control and house style was something we debated for quite a while, especially with so many contributors. We went for a two string approach, using the comments and messages facility to ensure that we were writing to a house style, then a check was done by the final approvers on each section.

A big change from doing this as we used to on shared Word documents is the evidence upload, I think this is the type of work we will start to see the benefits of down the line. When we get HMI and Ofsted in, things should be to hand straight away and there should be less of a stressful time assembling folders etc. Doing this while we are writing it was good as generally the stats you are looking for are to hand to be uploaded, unless they were paper based in which case we just wrote where it could be found in the Academy like a footnote on the text upload.

Generally the process has gone pretty well, though I found that chasing up still needed to be done quite regularly, it was useful to be able to see what sections had and had not been done and it was also useful to be able to check the history tab to see who exactly had contributed what to each section.

We are coming to the end of the cycle now and are considering whether in the future we want to run big updates as we have this time around or just get people to update as we go, for the first time it seemed wise to keep a tight hand on the process. At the very least I think we will update and add to the evidence folders as we go.


As to our next venture using SchoolIP, we have some work running with the ILP software and assertive mentoring. The ability to comment back and forth on objectives set by the teaching staff should be an interesting way to keep students aware that we are checking on their progress regularly.

George Faux
Shireland Collegiate Academy