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How to spend school budgets but save money (over £800/year!)

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School budgets are being squeezed relentlessly. The National Education Union showed 94% of 1,800 school staff surveyed have spent their own money on classroom resources! How do senior leaders decide where to spend the budget? Where is the smart money being spent?

Instead of cutting back on everything, take a look at what you can do to become more efficient. For example, have you ever added up the cost of dealing with paper-based evidence of learning?

Based on 1 photo per week per pupil in a single form entry primary school, we estimate this costs £2074.55 per year! Including cost of glue sticks £63.84 + cost of printing £532.35 + cost of time £1478.36.

Invest in time saving technology. Go digital for your pupil observations and reduce the time and costs involved in printing, cutting and sticking.  It can save your school over £800/year*

Going digital also has several advantages over paper. Digital cloud-based evidence can’t get lost. Digital evidence can be used to show a student’s progress over time for example from Year R through to Year 6. It can be used to support teacher judgements and to moderate work. End of year reports can be created quickly and easily.

One digital solution, shortlisted for 2 Bett Awards in 2018, is Evisense from B Squared. Using the Evisense app on a mobile device, teachers can instantly capture evidence of a child’s achievements and upload it to their profile. If you don’t have time to document your observations immediately you can add comments later. The data can also be used to identify skill gaps. Evidence can be viewed by student, class, subject, attainment level or skill. All staff can have access to see each pupil’s achievements and they can even be shared securely with parents, enabling greater parental engagement. Evisense boasts 99.8% uptime and outstanding security measures, including audit trails for users, access restrictions and the use of child protection lists.

Schools can sign up for a FREE 90 day trial from the Evisense website.

*Annual saving based on 1 photo per week per pupil in a single form entry primary school. Savings calculations available on request.

 

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