FINWIRE®

Barkston and Syston CE Primary School Chooses Vantage Technologies’ Paragon to Deliver Online Report

March 16th, 2009

Barkston and Syston CE Primary School will deploy Paragon, a web-based performance monitoring and management tool to give parents direct access to their children’s educational development, helping them to provide support and raise achievement by being more involved in their children’s education as outlined by new Government regulations coming into effect next year.

Paragon supports pupils’ development and learning requirements by allowing teachers to record evidence of their academic and behavioural performance in an easy-to-access portfolio, which can be accessed by parents.

This gives parents direct online access to an up-to-date record of their children’s performance and facilitates further involvement in their educational development by allowing them to review and comment on information about their child.

Andy Canadine, class teacher and ICT co-ordinator at Barkston and Syston CE Primary School, said: “I first came across Paragon when I was working as a course tutor at another organisation where it was used as a continuous professional development tool designed to aid the teacher training process. I found the tool excellent to use and it always has positive feedback so knew it was ideal and flexible enough to be adapted to use for reporting to parents.

“Paragon will be beneficial to parents as the results they see will help them be more aware of the areas their child needs to focus on and get help with. For small primary schools that don’t have complex reporting requirements such as Barkston and Syston, Paragon is ideal as it can easily be tailored to suit the needs of the individual school – making it as simple or as complex as necessary. This flexibility also makes it affordable for smaller schools with smaller budgets.”

Paragon lets teachers upload and store information about a pupil’s academic work, behaviour and attendance in a single location securely accessible by both parents and teachers, over the Internet at anytime. Parents can login via any PC with an Internet connection to assess their child’s progress. Schools are currently focussing on using ICT to monitor children’s literacy and numeracy.

Barkston and Syston CE Primary School will liaise with parents regarding the criteria and targets which will be built into Paragon and plan to pilot the solution with a selection of pupils after Easter; they hope to have it deployed across the whole school by September. The primary school will use Paragon in addition to traditional parent and teacher evenings to keep parents abreast of their children’s progression.

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