Training & Support
GL Education and Fischer Family Trust (FFT) have unveiled a joint initiative to provide schools with a new, easy-to-use value-added assessment tool.
The GL Education Value-Added Service will allow any school to measure accurately and fairly the impact its teaching has on students regardless of the level of education children have when they join the school.
GL Education, whose standardised assessments are widely used in the UK and around the world, and student performance experts FFT say they are confident that the service is more accurate than any similar product on the market because it uses more data inputs. Using GL Education’s Cognitive Abilities Test (CAT4) as its baseline measure, the service will include verbal, non-verbal, quantitative and spatial ability data as well as gender and birth dates, allowing schools to gauge accurately the performance of summer-born children, for instance.
The service will appeal to schools that have had to rely until now on their own value-added measures, which can be time-consuming for teachers to produce and which tend not to be benchmarked to national standards.
The information is delivered via an easy-to-use dynamic dashboard that allows teachers to analyse in detail the performance of individual students, classes, subject groups or the whole school – and to compare the results against other schools using the service.
Greg Watson, Chief Executive of GL Education, said he was delighted to be working with FFT: “Both organisations have years of experience in assessment and pupil performance and together can offer a unique tool to measure progress. This initiative will give schools an unprecedented ability to demonstrate objectively the value they add educationally, regardless of the child’s background or previous attainment.”
The venture is the first of its kind for FFT, a non-profit organisation that has been providing pupil performance data to over 15,000 UK schools since 2001.
Paul Charman, Managing Director of FFT, said: “FFT is delighted to be working in partnership with GL Education to provide a new service which will analyse examination results and value-added performance for schools. This partnership brings together GL Education’s assessment data and FFT’s education analytics expertise to help schools to evaluate their performance and support school improvement.”
GL Education’s Value-Added Service will not only allow detailed analysis of the performance of individual students but also of classes, schools or groups of schools. Its easy-to-use data dashboards allow schools to produce instant analyses without teachers wasting time developing their own charts or analytics.
ends
About FFT
FFT is a non-profit organisation established in 2001 as part of the Fischer Family Trust. We are focussed on providing accurate and insightful information to schools which enables pupils to achieve their full potential and schools to improve.
About GL Education
GL Education (known in the UK as GL Assessment) has a growing presence in British, bilingual and international schools in over 100 countries worldwide. We also provide assessment services to ministries of education and their agencies.
