SMARTcurriculum® Application
Dear SMARTcurriculum User
Our Summer 2 Update release went live on Friday 25th June, including a major change to staffing data to include the new Early Career Teacher Framework. Some action is required.
For a video version of this important Update, with a walk-through of changes in the SMARTcurriculum App and actions you will need to take, link here or watch below. Written explanation beneath.
Identifying Training Time
Now that the government has introduced the Early Career framework – replacing NQT with its 10% training allocation – we have introduced ECT1 (10%) and ECT2 (5%) in the SMARTcurriculum App to enable you to show the amount of training time that is allocated from your total teaching capacity. In addition to this – and because we have separated NQT from the status of a member of staff – you are now able to include allocations for staff who are undertaking national professional qualifications (NPQs) for leadership staff, and career-entry programmes (CEPs) for unqualified staff.
Representing the data
With this additional functionality we now have the capacity to quantify the amount of training time allocated to a range of staff, this will be included in the contact ration and staffing enhancement charts and tables. It will now appear on the main dashboard in the Staffing Enhancement chart, but for closer detail, navigate to Staffing Section and see the impact of training time on the Bought / Planned Comparison and the Contact Ration charts (shown below). You will also see that the no-TLR has been removed from the teacher status and supplement distribution chart for visual clarity. If you navigate to the data tables, they have also been updated to include this new data. In the Finance section, the Enhancement data table includes the financial implications.
Implementation – ACTION NEEDED
As a result of previous data entry, where the allocations of unqualified staff were sometimes adjusted, we encourage you to enter a negative value in the non-contact column. With this change and providing you with additional reporting of training investment, we have adjusted this data for you. Please review the staffing table to ensure that unqualified staff allocations are as you require them to be.
Where unqualified staff are undertaking career-entry programmes, eg Schools Direct or an apprenticeship, you will need to manually enter an allowance of training time to the appropriate column. Similarly, if a member of staff is to receive training time during an academic year to undertake an NPQ, then this should be added to the training time where it affects the cycle delivery.
Where a member of staff is identified as ECT, the system will automatically calculate the 10% or 5% allocation. Where this is not an integer value, you will need to edit up or down, depending on your delivery policy.
In-App Support videos
At the request of some users we have added a feature that will allow help videos to be placed within each tile element of the application. We will be adding videos throughout the Summer so watch out for this exciting new feature.
Chris and the SMARTcurriculum team
Do get involved
If you have any other ideas or priorities for development please comment below. We are keen to, and do, respond to requests and ideas where we can.
We also have a Developers group who help us to drive forward functions and new ideas.
If you would like to join our SMARTcurriculum Developers Group to drive innovations that support you best, please let us know on info@smartcurriculum.net.
Planned Developments
| Gender & Ethnic Pay Comparison – This is an important dimension of analysis that users have asked if it possible to include. We are exploring the data entry requirements to be able to achieve this – and dashboard charts that will simply illustrate equality and distribution. |
MIS Integration – We have been working for some time to consider integration to a number of popular software solutions. This is becoming more of a reality and we are looking to draw key data from you existing MIS to reduce the setup time and also to monitor the practice as things change through the year. We will keep you informed of progress in this regard. |
| School Group Module – We continue to structure the SMARTcurriculum Application to add a fully functional school group comparison module. Many of the developments above are on the road-map to that goal. We will keep you posted as to the progress and likely release date. Our plan is to have this development ready for initial release in early 2022. |
| SMARTcurriculum App developments are included within your annual licence, some module development will be included at additional costs. |
