Nowadays, there is a huge expectation placed on schools to ensure their community members are safe and rightly so. We have all witnessed in the media terrible incidents where schools have not adequately tracked, reported or intervened in incidents of behaviour and safeguarding. The impact can be long term for the school and those involved.

It may seem overwhelming for many schools but it doesn’t need to be and most schools already have a system that can help them. 

Their School Management Information System (MIS), this powerful system, unfortunately often reserved for use in the school office, can be utilised to store, track and report on incidences as well as rewards. And yes, it is just as important for schools to track all types of behaviour, both positive and negative, and ensure that the policy and strategy is implemented consistently across your establishment.

But before you do start to use your MIS to track behaviour, it is worth checking that it is up to the job. It should be effective in monitoring, implementing and reporting on your individual school’s behaviours and safeguarding policies. It should also enable you to store all appropriate actions and interventions within the incident to demonstrate how they have been dealt with and interventions applied to try and prevent the incident happening again.

Where to start 

Firstly, you should consider the way in which you want to track and report on incidents within your MIS. The right MIS will enable you to customise it to meet your needs. Ensure that you can track all incidents and correlate events against individual students. This will enable you to report on different types of incidents and also look at how effective your interventions and strategies have been.

Once completed it should:

• Provide a way to effectively monitor incidents
• Enable staff to report on these incidents
• Provide clearly defined and documented escalation routes which are shown against individual incidents
• Expose individual trends and patterns of behaviour
• Provide an easy way of reporting on the effectiveness of interventions and strategies on incidents within your school.

Implementing your policies and strategies

Your strategies should be implemented within your MIS and not be led by the structure or restrictions of your MIS. Online safety can be monitored, tracked and managed effectively in your MIS as well. 

Consider other elements of safeguarding and how effective your MIS can be in supporting you in this area. Talk to your MIS supplier about how you want your strategy to work and what you would like to report on and track and ask for examples of how their MIS has supported different schools. 

It is very important to demonstrate that all incidents, both positive and negative behaviours, have been tracked and reported on within your system

Behaviour and Online Safety strategies

It is very important to demonstrate that all incidents, both positive and negative behaviours, have been tracked and reported on within your system. Make sure that all escalations have been documented and interventions taken to prevent incidents from taking place. 

Then make sure that your behaviour strategy is being implemented by all staff consistently and that your policy is being effective in your school setting. 

Reporting within your MIS should be easy and all information about the child should be aligned to ensure that a clear and overall picture of the child is given. 

To do this it is important that you update your MIS regularly as a key bit of data could be missing and could be the linchpin to a set of behaviour types. 

Using your MIS as a central hub of information is crucial and will allow you to manage incidents successfully, track trends and patterns of behaviour and implement effective sanctions and interventions.

If you would like to find out more information on how your MIS can benefit your whole school, visit www.rm.com/rmintegris or call our MIS experts free on 0808 172 9531