As an ASCL Premier Partner and Bett-Award winner, BlueSky, is once again delighted to be supporting its Annual Conference on ‘Connected Leadership’ on 15-16 March 2019, ICC Birmingham.

This year, we celebrate our strong 10-year relationship with ASCL and Duncan Baldwin, Deputy Director of Policy said: “BlueSky is a powerful and innovative tool that ASCL is proud to endorse to our school leaders. The intuitive and time-saving nature of BlueSky enables strategic leaders to aggregate large sets of data, on performance and development in schools, and across MATs. The solution provides live insights saving our members significant time and money”.

Last year at the ASCL Annual Conference, BlueSky announced its launch of an exciting new, online ‘Partnership’ management information module, which has seen take-up of its latest offering soar in the first nine months of operation.

The BlueSky Partnership module, captures live data on the performance of staff across an organisation and on the professional development activities and needs of each one.

It then combines the data to produce a detailed picture of the impact training and development activity has had across a single organisation or group, and where there are gaps to fill.

Leaders can then use the insights to set objectives, shape strategic planning and support quality assurance for the whole organisation.

One trust, for example, has used the Partnership module to support talent-spotting, improve collaboration between schools and to standardise appraisals and HR practices across the trust.

The module was designed for use initially in education by Trusts and Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) to help them draw together data from across their different schools.

Since its launch in 2018, it has been adopted by numerous organisations, early adopters such as small trusts of three, through to large trusts of tens of schools that has demonstrated the scalability of the module and has enabled significant impact.

BlueSky MD Denise Inwood says: “The existing BlueSky modules enabled individual staff to record their professional development goals and activity and track their progress and impact, information which is shared with their heads and line managers.

“The Partnership module takes this to the next level by combining all of that live data across a complex organisation and producing a picture for the leadership of how their staff are performing and what the patterns and trends are across the individual schools, departments or partnerships are at any given time.

“They then use this information to shape the strategy for the whole organisation. In this way, the insights don’t just apply to performance management but can help to improve how the trust approaches related functions, including HR, quality assurance, recruitment and retention, talent-spotting.”

“The module enables sharing of data across any appropriate complex organisation,” says Denise. “It could be a chain of academies, a network of NQT providers, a teaching school alliance, a local authority that might be looking at schools it is responsible for or a private company that owns five schools in the Middle East – It would work with any group of organisations where data is shared.”

The Partnership module is free to schools and trusts with an existing or new BlueSky subscription. Exclusive discounts are available to new BlueSky clients that are ASCL members.