Features & Benefits
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Appraisal
BlueSky supports a developmental approach to performance management reviews, and enables staff to engage in rich professional dialogue continuously throughout the cycle.
BlueSky's tailored process aligns with the culture of your organisation, providing staff with a secure portal, giving them ownership of their development and professional progression. Staff goals can be aligned to departmental and strategic priorities of the organisation, with instant, granular and holistic reporting available.
The multi-functional nature of BlueSky's modules allows for the triangulation of performance reviews, professional learning and monitoring.
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Observations & Monitoring
Incorporate formal and informal monitoring and developmental activities such as learning visits, curriculum deep dives, drop-ins, book scrutiny and reflections on any device.
The customisable templates are created based on your own practice including aspects such as professional dialogue, developmental feedback, bespoke criteria and national or school frameworks.
Instant reporting to identify emerging talent, to influence your CPD strategy, and track teaching over time.
Monitoring activities can be triangulated to support an individual's career progression and can be mapped to the strategic goals of your organisation.
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CPD & Professional Learning
BlueSky supports the entire CPD process in your organisation, from promotion and booking to evaluation, ensuring transparency and removing time consuming tasks.
Publish your entire professional learning programme for staff to engage with and you can upload supplementary resources such as video, research, links, etc. enabling staff to access the provision anywhere anytime.
Staff can record and evaluate their own CPD activities, and leaders can reflect on the quality and effectiveness.
The agile process in BlueSky makes it easy to validate impact and streamline analysis as well as approve and review cover when necessary.
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School Evaluation
BlueSky provides the mechanism to capture all types of quality assurance; from learning visits to work scrutiny.
The bottom-up approach supports evidenced-based decision making and provides teams and leaders with meaningful data to inform school improvement and action planning.
BlueSky's Executive Summary report provides a powerful snapshot of the organisation, based on customisable templates using inspection frameworks, organisation and/or departmental objectives, whilst archiving data to support effective tracking over time. Particularly useful when providing information to governors, trustees, boards and inspectors.
You can write your SEF (Self-Evaluation Framework) and improvement plan too – completing the cycle.
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Trusts & Groups
Our Partnership module provides global cross-school reporting and opportunities for collaboration within a trust or group of schools, and we always ensure a cost-saving for schools purchasing as a Trust or Group. BlueSky supports:
- Collaboration – facilitates professional learning and action research between and within schools
- Coordination – of programmes, such as those for ITTs and NPQs
- Quality Assurance – of monitoring processes such as teaching and learning
- Human Resources – including performance management, succession planning and talent management
Partnership is free of charge when schools in a group have a membership.
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National & Bespoke Standards
This feature helps you to review your reviews, against set professional standards or your own bespoke benchmarks.
You can also aggregate reviews across a team, a school or a whole trust, identifying the experts and focusing on the gaps.
Validate your findings with end-of-year review evidence, and hold conversations and career expectations based on solid data.
BlueSky also supports 360 reviews and feedback.
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Individual Progress Summary
The Progress Summary gives you an instant overview of a staff member's entire career, distilled onto a single page.
The individual, manager, and school leaders have access to live summarised data to support tracking teaching over time which helps validate effectiveness and provides a clear and concise showcase of achievements.
The individual, manager, and school leaders have access to live data to support reviews and achievements To save you time and reduce your workload, BlueSky automatically generates this data instantly over time.
Did you know, our longest member can generate 13 years worth of staff data in a single report!
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Projects & Collaboration
Projects enables collaboration on every aspect of professional practice within schools and across different schools. For example, action research, subject specific pedagogy and coaching.
The area allows staff to create a project and invite specific colleagues to participate, be shared openly with everyone in the organisation or even across the whole BlueSky network of 300,000 user profiles.
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Teaching Schools
BlueSky can support teaching schools with their additional responsibilities and these are coordinating school-led ITT, school-to-school support and providing professional and leadership development for schools in their alliance.
You can track requests, workflow and impacts of demands such as SLEs, NLEs, LLEs and also monitor communications and performance reviews, and report impacts on teams and individuals. And all paper-free.
Did you know, you can share your training to schools in your alliance even for schools that are not yet BlueSky members!
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ITT & NQT
BlueSky provides an online, portable, journal and career portfolio for trainee teachers which moves with them from induction to their teaching career.
Supporting your programme by providing a clear, consistent and robust evidence-based solution for Initial Teacher Training (ITT). The variety of flexible features that provide secure communication, recording and monitoring.
Teach First, the largest graduate recruiter in the UK, use BlueSky to support the progress-tracking of its participants working in over 900 primary and secondary schools.
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BlueSky Learning
An easy access professional development library that provides research-based, practitioner-led CPD modules through highly focused, manageable learning sessions.
Modules are delivered in short sections, providing knowledge, practical activities, and implementation strategies to sustain and embed practice.
Our modules are flexible so that they can be accessed anywhere, anytime and individuals can decide how to engage with them - all in one go or in separate sessions and activities.
Find out more - click here for BlueSky Learning CPD content library
Start your BlueSky journey today!
Contact us to find out how we can support you and your organisation. You can also arrange a free no-obligation demo. Call us +44 (0)1483 880004 or click the button below and we’ll come straight back to you.