Development: Synthesising Specialist Guidance to Level Up

Across multi-academy trusts there are often many school improvement visits that happen each term. Teaching and leadership are assessed by experts and recommendations are proposed. Inspiration Trust is no different, with subject specialist leads using their experience, knowledge, and expertise, to determine the best way forward for our teams of teachers across the trust.

Across the year our experts perform over 200 visits, using their judgement to support our teams to improve. But what if they could have a helping hand to synthesise their own findings to help direct developments and effort...

As a trust, we have made it clear that AI cannot be used for performance management purposes and will not be used to ‘mark’ or ‘judge’ the performance of our teams. By listening to insights gained from visits by our subject specialist leads, our staff are on a constant journey of improvement. Our peer development and guidance upskill and support our staff to be able to perform at their very best without the use of AI.

When looking at the bigger picture as an academy trust, it can sometimes be hard to bring subject reports together in a way that can be used usefully to inform our specialists. The many strands of information that are available can be hard to analyse, as reports are produced in a qualitative format, capturing nuance and context in each setting, it can be particularly difficult to identify trends.

Addressing this issue at Inspiration Trust is Emily Banks, Computer Science Subject Specialist Lead, who has pioneered an AI tool that will be able to synthesise reports across multiple visits for use by subject specialist leaders to inform their practice and help them direct impactful CPD.

The trends identified will be able to provide subject specialist leads with a snapshot of the reports they have created, in a manageable way. The tool will help them analyse the findings of over 200 subject reports across the year, with the potential to use this insight to inform and adapt CPD appropriately in response to priorities across the trust.

Development of this tool has been in collaboration with our subject specialist leads, and has ensured that their unique subject lens and voices were captured correctly, specifically to align with their visions of each subject. After multiple testing phases, the tool is still in its infancy but can pick up on the subtleties in how each subject lead writes their reports, providing trends for leaders to analyse.

We look forward to seeing how our teams can work closely to ensure that the introduction of this tool and others are implemented in a cautious and considered approach. By keeping our subject experts at the heart of these developments, we can be sure that our progress aligns with our values at every step of the journey.