The everyday challenges of reporting pastoral incidents are many and varied – and getting things back on track after the incident often requires a coordinated response to ensure the wellbeing of the learner and the success of their next class… so how do outstanding specialist colleges manage this process?
Student wellbeing is at the heart of specialist colleges. So when pastoral incidents take place that impact the wellbeing of a learner, or of those in the wider learning community – being able to act fast and appropriately is key to getting things back on track.
The everyday challenges, however, are difficult to overcome if you are reporting pastoral incidents using paper-based records, including:
- Multiple incidents that need to be recorded and tracked,
- When more than one student is involved it often means creating multiple paper-trails for the same incident,
- Alerting relevant teachers, tutors, carers, parents and guardians to the incident is a time-consuming process,
- There is no one single version of the truth as separate reports come in from witnesses and others that are involved,
- Reports get saved in silos, or worse, records and sensitive information get saved/shared in ways that breach your security protocols.
Leading specialist colleges report serious incidents differently. They use specialist data management systems to ensure vital incident information is available to teachers, tutors, carers and parents/guardians – instantly - in time to make a difference to the wellbeing of the student, and the success of their next class.
Online Portals provide each teacher with a dashboard where they can see at a glance (before they begin their lesson) the number of ‘At Risk’ learners and any incidents that may impact the class or that require monitoring/action from them.
Should an incident take place in class, they can also use the portal to:
- Quickly and easily create one incident report – even if it involved multiple students,
- Record all the details via the portal using pre-configured, customisable incident forms,
- Invite witnesses to add comments and supporting information directly to the report,
- Instantly alert anyone who needs to take action or monitor the student’s behaviour such as staff members, pastoral managers and student services etc.,
- Automatically and securely alert people who may be affected such as other tutors, carers and guardians (via notification/ email/ text),
- Recommend the steps that need to be taken to deal with the incident,
- Track and monitor responses to the incident through to resolution,
- Close the incident report when resolved with full traceability of the action taken.
As well as making it quicker and easier to create accurate records of incidents, using a student management system with an online portal for Serious Incident Reporting provides an audit trail of the incident from beginning to close.
Having this accurate information also means that those involved in the student’s learning journey can make informed decisions to improve the quality of provision and positively impact wellbeing. (In our next blog we’ll be looking at this subject in more detail, examining how outstanding specialist colleges go beyond incident reporting and analyse incident data to inform their behavioural management strategies.)
If you’d like to know more about how Tribal can assist your specialist college to capture, come and visit us at the NATSPEC conference on 24 - 25 April.
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