"When you find something as good as this, you just want to share it with your team."
- Headteacher, Tyne & Wear.
Now supporting schools in: Huddersfield · London · Birmingham · Bournemouth · Exeter · Darlington · Manchester · Oldham · Reading · Hastings · Dewsbury · Hertfordshire · Thameside · Lancaster · Leicester · York · Wolverhampton · Leicester · Derby
Add your staff team, governors and school improvement colleagues to your personalised online dashboard.
Select and assign your learning walks, observations, pupil book evaluations or surveys to your team. Observe on a selected date or over a time period.
Grab your tablet or ipad and head out into school with your colleagues. Enter your views live as you observe, building a real-time evaluation from multiple observations.
Your online dashboard will now display your teams' observations, statistical reporting and individual feedback. Your current strengths and areas for improvement will be clearly presented.
We know how accountable you are. Your electronic PDF reports will serve to support your teacher feedback conversations, inspections, and your school improvement planning.
As a busy and long serving Headteacher, I found that I began to question some of the fundamental aspects of how schools are expected to improve. For example, if teaching and learning is always most important thing, then why are the methods that we use often so time consuming and uninspiring, with systematic cycles that could have little to do with any day to day activity. Our school had been on a journey from special measures to two consecutive 'good' judgements, and because we were always looking to improve, I knew that we could only do this if our methods themselves could evolve. To consider this, I began to use my ipad to wander around the school, gathering my thoughts more regularly. Then I did the same but with another group of Headteachers, all using the same focused criteria. We all took a one hour learning walk and spent ten minutes or so in each class. The outcome was a report that could tell me exactly what my colleagues thought, alongside my views. Our teachers much preferred this because they said that it was just business as usual, despite us capturing so much more. I then used this report for inspections, for the governors, for individual feedback, and for our leadership planning. My learning partners and the inspectors found our methods forward thinking and my reports credible. We began to apply quick and significant changes, more regularly, rather than just working through appraisal based, stand-alone observations. Our teachers and other leaders all began to contribute and participate in learning walks, often scheduled to occur over a week or half-term. All of this would mean less time sitting behind desks desk managing clunky systems and trying to find areas for improvement from summative data.
Headteachers, leaders, teachers and visitors can now walk around school, capturing their views with Nautilus. Every discovery can be presented clearly on the Headteachers online dashboard, ready for use. Nautilus is the product of a long and important process and I would now hope to help Headteachers to be able see more, know more and to be able to work much more intuitively and productively.
David.
'...assessing the right things when judging the quality of education...'
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'...workbook srutiny provides a window into the quality of curriculum implementation...'
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A collection of Headteacher short stories by school improvement consultant, former Headteacher and the co-creator of Nautilus.
January 2021
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'...Research into the effectiveness of lesson observations shows that the time is ripe for change....'
28 January 2020
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