Overviews - Attainment report tour

Updated 1 month ago by James Pembroke

The attainment overview is an easy to use and visually engaging report that will bring your data to life, making it accessible to a range of key audiences. If you want a quick summary of learning across your school, this is a great place to start.

This guide will walk through some examples to show how to:

Access and run the Overviews - Attainment report
Use the report controls to select subjects and different types of assessment data
Make use of filters and grouping tools to explore the data
View a Venn diagram showing combined attainment
Use the 'Advanced Options' to create different views of your data
Select the whole school and compare year groups

The guide also includes top tips to help simplify the process and get the most from the report. Let's get started!

Using the Overviews - Attainment report in Insight

Click on the 'Cohorts' menu and select 'Overviews – Attainment'.

This will load the report for the most recent pupil groups you have been investigating for the current term. Here we're looking at year 5:

You will notice there are several options: you can select academic year, term, assessment type, and subject. By default, the report will load data for all subjects and assessments for which you have data stored.

The screenshot above shows various assessment data for an example school's year 5 children (your report might look quite different!) Here, 'Average depth' relates to objectives assessed for each pupil; 'Rising Stars' shows a breakdown of results of standardised tests; 'Main Assessment' is a summary of teacher assessment. Below the charts is a summary of combined attainment.

You can hide the combined attainment table by clicking Advanced Options and de-selecting 'Show stats for combined attainment'

A quick win: attainment in Reading, Writing & Maths

A common thing to want to see is the results of teacher assessment for Reading, Writing and Maths. This is where the control options come in: I can select 'Main Assessment' in the Assessment Name list, and select 'Reading', 'Writing' and 'Maths' from the Subjects list:

The report now displays just three bars – one for each subject – that show the proportion of pupils in Year 5 (Summer term) that are Well below, Just below, Expected, and Above. Also, because we have reduced our report to just three bars (instead of the multiple subjects and assessments types we had previously), Insight is now able to produce Venn diagrams to show the combined attainment.

All reports are interactive. Clicking on sections of the bar or Venn diagrams will reveal pupil names. By clicking on Advanced Options and selecting ‘Show pupil names’ those names can be permanently displayed in a table below each bar and Venn diagram.

Exploring the data

Insight's filtering and grouping options allow you to define which pupils you want to include and how you want to compare them. These are accessed via the ‘Filter Pupils’ and ‘Group Pupils’ buttons at the top of the screen. Here’s a simple example: the ‘Gender’ option has been applied from the ‘Group Pupils’ drop down menu. We can now compare the attainment of boys to that of girls, with a bar and set of Venn diagrams produced for each group and subject:

Another useful option is to group by Key Groups. This will break our data down by all main groups of pupils in one go. Again, click the ‘Group Pupils’ button and select ‘Key Groups’ from the dropdown menu. Now we can compare the attainment of all the main key groups in one report:

You are not restricted to this list of key groups. On the Admin > Change School Settings > Key Groups page, you can create your own list of key groups, including your own school-defined groups. This will ensure that any Key Groups reports reflect your areas of focus.

Broaden the scope: multiple year groups

So far we've focused on year 5. You can use Insight's filters to look at a class or other set of pupils instead (such as all children with SEND across the school). Let's look at a useful example of viewing data for several year groups at once.

If you're following along with your own data, start by clearing any active filters and groups by clicking the ‘x’ against any filters and/or groups you can see. Then click 'Filter Pupils' and choose 'Year Group'.

Click the Year Group selection dropdown and click ‘Multiple selections’ at the bottom of the list:

This allows you to select more than one year group. Here, we'll select years 1 to 6, then click ‘Apply Filter’.

The report is now showing a whole school view (note the number of pupils shown beside each bar). It's often useful at this point to show how each year group compares. To do this, we use the ‘Group Pupils’ option, selecting the ‘Year Group’ option from the bottom of the dropdown list. This will take our whole school view and break it down into separate year groups for each subject:

This is a very useful report for governors, especially if shown alongside the results for the previous term or year for comparison. A Headlines report – which we'll soon cover in a separate guide - takes this one stage further by presenting data for different point in time side-by-side.

In the Advanced Options, you can opt to view grouped data either by 'Assessments, then pupil groups' (the default shown above), or by 'Pupil groups, then assessments'. Switching views for this particular scenario lets you see each year group's results in all subjects together:

Other types of assessment

So far we've been dealing with teacher assessment, but we can use this report to investigate other types of assessment as well. Here's an example of a report summarising year 5's summer attainment in a set of standardised tests:

Here we may want to take advantage of another setting under 'Advanced Options'. If you have more than four assessment categories, you can get a more detailed view of your data by clicking on 'Advanced Options' and changing the 'Compare' setting to ‘Detailed breakdown’:

The score thresholds that define the attainment groupings are not fixed and you are not limited to four categories. Please get in touch to discuss changing the thresholds in accordance with your assessment policy.

And finally… Download and Print

If you want to send the report to someone, you can either Download it as an image file, or click Print and use your web browser's 'Print to PDF' or 'Save as PDF' option. The latter is recommended for emailing and sharing with governors.

Another option is simply to copy and email the URL (the web address) in the address bar. This is a good option for sharing amongst staff who have their own access.

Further support

This has been a whirlwind tour touching on most features of a report that can be used for various purposes. If you need help with anything not covered here, just contact our friendly support team.