Here’s the first page of my School Analytics pupil dashboard. It’s built using SIMS and Power BI – where SIMS provides the raw data and Power BI provides the analysis and visualisation – and it is intended to show the data required by a primary school to demonstrate the key qualities of their pupils.

SIMS and Power BI Dashboard Headlines

The first tile shows the number of pupils currently on roll, followed by a pie chart that shows the gender split. Bar charts for SEN pupils, pupil premium and EAL pupils follow.

It’s important to know that practically all these graphs are interactive – click on the 88 pupil premium pupils represented on the PP graph and immediately all the other graphs adjust to show the relative number of pupil premium pupils within the (say) the EAL group, or within each year group.

I’ve added some traffic lights to indicate good, average and poor attendance (the overall attendance rate is red if the percentage drops below 95%, yellow between 95 and 96% and green above 96%).

In this (imaginary) school, I also decided to highlight year groups that are oversubscribed, so you’ll see that year 5 is red.

A map show the distribution of pupils throughout the local area. The size of the dots indicates how many pupils live at that postcode. Pupils who are persistent absentees will be highlighted in red to help the pastoral staff target problem families.

The school is clearly diverse, so I’ve added a count of first and home language to emphasise that diversity.

This is the first page of a full Power BI report. The report is available for schools to purchase. More details at www.schoolanalytics.co.uk.