RM Assessment

RM Assessment was commissioned by the National Consortium for Exam Results (NCER) in the UK to provide a secure, unified reporting system to automate data distribution, and aggregate results at a school and local authority level.

Key criteria:

• Flexible and easy to use for data officers and senior school improvement;
• Identify trends in results and any areas of concern;
• Will cater for changes in educational policy with minimal, or no redevelopment.

The Approach

To meet the requirements of the NCER, RM set up a user group. This group was comprised of representative Local Authorities (LAs) to take the role as customer for the project. Working together with the user group, RM established the agreed criteria for the analysis considering the following:

• different, and sometimes conflicting, LA requirements;
• future developments in terms of educational data, performance indicators and LA priorities;
• a stated objective of sharing best practice in data analysis;
• the balance between richness of functionality and usability.

The Benefits

The first phase of the system was released to users in early 2008, and is currently being actively used by over 120 LAs.

EPAS has provided LAs with their earliest view of their complete set of educational attainment data, and the means of immediately analysing their data against benchmark groups. Users have particularly benefited from the flexible design of EPAS as it has enabled analysis to be included to cover last minute statutory requirements.

The Future

Local Government sees RM as a critical partner for adapting the system to reflect curriculum changes and new qualifications. RM Assessment will be a key partner in developing this, to ensure feedback on successful introduction as well as identifying good practice and areas that need extra support from local government support systems.