Client notes
After the papers went out
These comments name a pack, a constraint, or a meeting. They are not star ratings.
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The autumn pack arrived with the issues list on one side of A4. Our chair used that page and barely opened the rest until questions started. I still wish we had commissioned earlier — we sent the extract a week later than planned and the briefing sat uncomfortably close to papers going out.
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Board members from the workshops kept asking what ‘timely achievement’ meant. The rewritten captions used the words we already use on the shop floor, and the subcontract page stopped the usual mixing of partner figures into our own.
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I asked for percentages on every pupil group. They left several cells blank and wrote why. It annoyed me in the draft; in the meeting it stopped a parent governor from quoting a figure that would have identified a family in the village.
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The mid-year attendance paper used our own cut-off, so it matched what I had already shown in briefing. The heat-map by year group was the only page the head took into the corridor conversation with Year 9 tutors.
Three academies, one cut-off date
Marcus came to us in January with three different attendance papers and no shared freeze date. One academy had counted inset days; another had not. The first draft of a comparison would have ranked a school for a coding choice, not for pupils in classrooms.
We stopped the charts and wrote a one-page indicator dictionary. Each principal signed it. Extracts were re-pulled for the Friday before half term. Two academies met the date; the third appeared in the annex as ‘extract not received’ with a trustee note rather than an estimated bar.
The board spent its time on the school that had missed the cut-off — which was the point — instead of on a league table nobody trusted. Marcus still sends the dictionary out each September before anyone opens a spreadsheet.