Sharing data is very important when it comes to assessing a students ability. Connecting Steps is designed to allow all areas and screens to be printed out and shared with parents/guardians and any other people involved with the students assessment and progression. This transfer of information helps parents/guardians get involved with their child's education. Teachers can also use the B Squared Assessment points to identify key areas in which a student is struggling and assemble those points into an IEP. Parents can also be given a copy of the IEP to help and assist with the development of the listed skills during the evenings and weekends or any allocated home time.

Feedback to Teachers

Connecting Steps is designed to make the information entered by teachers as useful as possible and give as much feedback as possible. Teachers can easily look at the information they have entered in many different ways. They can look at the achievements made, the skills left to achieve, look at progression over time both through levels and within levels. The different reports allow teachers to pull out the information they need, whether it be for report writing, annual reviews or creating individual learning plans.

Sharing data with Parents

It has always been important to share information with parents, but the information shared with parents is not always clear. Parents often don't understand what the levels mean and don't understand what is meant when a child progresses from one level to the next. The detail in B Squared assessment helps parents understand what skills make up a level, sharing the individual pages with a parent allows a teacher to show the skills the child has achieved, where the next steps are and how parents can help reinforce these skills. The simple language used within B Squared assessment points means a parent can now relate to the level of learning, they can see how the levels change and they can get more involved with the child's learning.

Reporting to Ofsted & Governers

Schools often have to build and create various reports to inform Ofsted, Governers and other agencies. B Squared's GAP software allows schools to quickly and easily build reports for any cohort for any date or time frame. The ease of creating reports allows schools to look at data for different primary need, looked after children, free school meals, local authority, intervention groups, therapy groups or focus groups. The data can be filtered or sorted and if needed can be exported into Excel for even more analysis of the data. The reports always show individual data and the average, so you can look at the spread of data, identify the high or low achievers in a cohort. Producing reports with Connecting Steps and GAP is easy, teachers have collected the information throughout the year with their assessments and its just a few clicks to produce the report needed.

Passing on assessment information to the next school

Schools can pass on the Connecting Steps assessment data to the next school. By simply exporting the pupil data, this can then be emailed or transferred on a CD or USB disk to the next school. Many authorities have standardised on B Squared assessment for SEN pupils, this standardises assessment for pupils within the authority but also allows detailed data to be passed between schools so that pupils learning is continuous as a pupil changes between schools. One of the many benefits of B Squared is the linking of skills between curriculums, this means that data from an establishment working on the EYFS can be transferred to a school working on the P Levels and National Curriculum. All the skills achieved in the EYFS that are also in the P Levels/National Curriculum will be transferred, so the school can immediately see the skills the child has already learnt.