Welcome to the Scholarpack blog

With the new school year fast approaching, you may be looking at your induction plan, and particularly at welcome packs for new pupils and parents. In the post below, we look at what might be included in such packs, and offer examples from different types of schools.

The Trust Capacity Fund, announced last month by former education secretary Damian Hinds, is new for 2019/20, and will predominantly be for multi academy trusts to spend on growing. We outline what it covers, how much trusts can get and how to apply.

As your trust grows, one major challenge is ensuring that your branding is consistent and effective, while at the same time celebrating individual schools and the things that make them unique. Your brand plays a key role in making your trust and schools stand out, making it clear what you stand for, and will help to attract parents, pupils and staff to your schools. Below we outline the principles of good branding and show you how you can change your vision into a brand.

One of the issues that we know is at the forefront of multi academy trust leaders’ minds is that of effectively scaling up: adding new schools and building up central operations. We speak to Chris Kirk, education consultant and MAT expert at CJK Associates about MAT growth and achieving economies of scale.

When joining a MAT, school leaders are often fearful about the loss of autonomy over areas ranging from curriculum to finance. We speak to Chris Kirk, education consultant and MAT expert at CJK Associates about how responsibilities can be effectively distributed across a trust.

With so much recent news coverage on the subject of off-rolling, we decided to take a closer look at the official exclusions guidance. We find out when pupils can be excluded and for how long. We also investigate how to record exclusions on attendance registers.

We sought the help of our associate education expert David New to put together some top tips on how to update student and staff information efficiently on your MIS.

The end of the school year will soon be upon us and you are probably already thinking about report writing. Below, we have compiled some handy examples of time-saving report-writing strategies from schools around the country, alongside tips on how to improve your reporting processes.

Interventions are a common way of attempting to boost a pupil’s achievement. But how can you track whether they are bringing about positive change? We spoke to 2 of our associate education experts, Anita Devi and Bill Dennison, about how schools can evaluate the impact and value for money of interventions.

As Damien Hinds stated in last year’s Strategy for Education Providers and the Technology Industry, ICT can play a fundamental part in helping tackle some of the challenges that we face in education. But, as he points out, it can be difficult for education leaders to separate evidence-based practice and products from technological gimmicks. There is one recommendation, however, that has been generally accepted as highly beneficial to the sector - the adoption of the Cloud.