Replacing spreadsheets to empower teacher development

Generate Teaching Hub

Generate Teaching Hub is a teaching school hub which provides training and development to teachers in Halton, Warrington and Wigan. This catchment encompasses over 300 schools.

The organisation provides training for teachers from the moment that they enter into the profession, right through to when they’re senior and executive leaders. They offer a variety of different programmes to support these different roles and stages of progression. 

Their work also involves running events — both online and face-to-face. They share information by writing reports and organising networks, in turn, bringing educational professionals together and giving them the necessary resources to succeed in their role. 

The group had seen significant growth since launching in September 2021. Today, they work with over 700 Teachers and are projected to be working with approximately 1400 education professionals by September 2022. 

Project Background

Generate Teaching Hub needed a system that could not only store data securely, but also visualise the sophisticated data relationships between records. 

Prior to using Gridfox, Generate Teaching Hub managed data around activities, events and attendance using multiple spreadsheets. 

Using spreadsheets meant that their processes were isolated and static. When it came to where certain information was stored and in which spreadsheet, employees usually relied on their own memory.

In short, there was no automatic way of doing data analysis. This issue meant that there was no way of seeing that a teacher had attended more than one event, or that schools had engaged in more than one event. 

Generate Teaching Hub quickly realised that their requirements for quick data analysis was going to exceed the capabilities of their existing spreadsheet setup. 

The organisation had considered enterprise CRM systems as a solution, but soon realised these systems came with unwanted features and didn’t allow the hub to track the exact data that they needed. 

Gridfox, alternatively, provided a way to pull all this data together into one centralised platform. Generate Teaching Hub also benefited from the Gridfox’s customer support, where they gained an expert insight into what data they needed to be tracking and how they could build a tool to support their requirements. 

The Build

Having attended some Gridfox demos and training events, Generate Teaching Hub felt confident about getting started building a project with Gridfox. 

During these initial stages, the organisation benefited from personal support from a Gridfox expert who was able to review the project with them and identify what data they wanted to track.

Dealing with so much information related to schools and teachers, Generate Teaching Hub needed a project that would allow them to securely manage this data and follow the progression of teachers throughout their professional development. When teachers registered with the hub they would input their personal details and the school they were with. 

The first stage of their build, therefore, was adding Tables focused around Teachers and Schools. Generate Teaching Hub could then use this information to track that teacher’s activity, as well as all the relevant data about the schools that this teacher attended.  

This setup provided the perfect base for tracking other essential data like activities, events and programmes. These additional tables could be linked to the existing Parent tables to give a more complete teacher profile. 

After getting comfortable with their project, Generate Teaching Hub have been able to expand their setup with increasingly sophisticated Parent-Child and Grandparent data relationships.

Today, the organisation has a robust database that they can quickly pull data from without the need to alternate between multiple spreadsheets. 

Results

Gridfox plays a central role in Generate Teaching Hub’s software setup and acts as a single source of truth for all users. The platform is used by all employees, with new starters also being trained upon joining the organisation. 

Generate Teaching Hub also has enhanced visibility over their essential organisation data. The ability to access data about teachers and the schools in which they work, for example, allows Generate to create a more rounded profile of their teachers and to validate their credentials more accurately. 

Linking tables has also enabled the organisation to have an overview of these intersecting areas of the company. For example, someone might attend a CPD workshop and then register for a longer national qualification programme. 

A new teacher might, additionally, have a mentor who is attached to their progression. With linked tables, the organisation can get a quick view of these relationships. This outcome gives teams a more detailed profile of the teacher’s that they’re dealing with. 

When it comes to sharing data, Generate has been able to produce information with greater effectiveness by using Gridfox’s Export a Report function. With just a few clicks, employees can create an accessible  report style export of their data and share this with relevant stakeholders. 

Having the ability to quickly produce a snapshot of their data gives employees more time to concentrate on their work. Gridfox provides a highly efficient solution to previous processes which required employees to draw data from multiple spreadsheets and merge this info into another document.

With a system that the organisation understands, Generate Teaching Hub is confident in its information and decisions.

Key Features 

• Explorer for sophisticated data relationships 
• Calendar View for visibility over upcoming events
• Export a Report for quick data sharing