After spending a day with Microsoft Innovative Schools and
before visiting BETT, I toured Cornwallis Academy, a K-12 school outside of London and
managed by the Future Schools Trust. The leadership team demonstrated lookred®, an information system key to their approach to “personalise” learning and “pastoral care.”
Almost two years ago, Susan Patrick from iNACOL introduced me to lookred founder and CEO Chris Poole; so, I sent him some
questions.
TVA: Chris, it looks like lookred is built on SharePoint.
CP: Yes, lookred utilizes Sharepoint and other Microsoft business intelligence tools. We’ll be moving on to Office 365
shortly. lookred has designed and built integration technology to schools management information systems, user interface customisation for education, and a
services layer to bring education specific functionality such as electronic assignments, lesson reporting and grading. The architecture follows the
principle that Microsoft use for Office365, utilising a multi-tenanted approach that ensures data segregation, performance optimisation and the ability to
scale.
TVA: Where did this idea come from?
CP: With our backgrounds we are bringing what we know about how other sectors (retail, banks, police. Government, etc.) have been using data etc to change
their business models and contextualising that for education. We have been interested in how supermarkets have used data for some
time. Indeed our provocation is “What if we knew as much about learners as Amazon and Tesco do about their customers ...”
TVA: Right, back in 1993 when I was in retail I had detailed item and customer information daily. Then in 1994 as a superintendent I had no information
on anything.
CP: That’s because education (all stakeholders) don’t have the right tools to help them turn the challenges and pressures of urgent need to raise
standards, student engagement, accountability, transparency, “do more with less” -- into opportunity.
TVA: What specific functions does lookred handle for schools?
The products are lookred® Spaces and lookred® Insights.
lookred® Spaces allows personalised anywhere, anytime access to all aspects of teaching and learning. Spaces is a platform that allows seamless integration
with all educational services from library management to careers service information. Social enterprise features engage the user through blogs, wiki’s,
tags and notes, and powerful search capabilities across content and people.
lookred® Insights provides analytics and trends, with compelling visualisations of the data. Education systems are not short of data but they are short of
information. The striking benefit in the lookred® solution is being able to find individual slices of information scattered across a number of systems,
bring them into one view and then interact with it in a meaningful way to make better decisions.
TVA: What does that mean for education leaders?
At a local authority, state, or national level, leaders can access aggregated information from multiple source systems to understand holistic issues and
assist in making more informed decisions on policy.
The school leader and senior leadership teams are empowered by free and timely access to pertinent information on school performance, levels of
intervention success, and alerts on student behaviour and achievement. Through simple to use tools and familiar interfaces questioning the information is
straightforward to understand. For example, why attendance has dipped, what contributed to the rise in Maths attainment, or which staff members are
displaying good practice, and why.
Students and staff are presented with personalised dashboards of their own school history and information. Staff can see information for their tutor groups
or classes; see where pupils are tracking well to targets or where behavioural issues may need to be addressed. Students can see their own progress and
information on where they are expected to be, and when.
TVA: Are you just focused on education now?
CP: Along the way in our three years we have been (positively) diverted back into other sectors namely corporate learning and more recently the travel
industry. Perversely they have seen what we are doing in education and said ‘we need those tools, meaningful information and imagination’ to help our
business have better insights and make more informed decisions.
We have a handful of reference sites at different stages in both secondary and primary. We have also focussed on building a few key partnerships with Dell, for example, and other smaller vendors. From that position we are now finalising commercial discussions that will take
us beyond 100 schools!
TVA: What is the Dell partnership?
CP: The work we are involved in with Dell is to develop an “education as a service” proposition. Essentially we are the ‘managing partner’ in the
development of that proposition.
We are even working in Russia! I spent last week in London with Microsoft Russia scoping out the next stage of our involvement there. In simple terms over
the last 2 years we have been involved with the Government and now 12 regions to design their school modernisation programme. They called that “new school”
initially and going back a while on the back of some very successful workshops that we ran in Moscow for key stakeholders, lookred won a competition to
take the ideas forward to scale....which is what is starting now. There are 15 million students in Russia and schools at varying stages of development!
Like everywhere else they know how important the reform of their school system is -- and they know technology and data is going to be at the heart of a
modernised experience for learners and educators. lookred(r) solutions look good in Cyrillic!
TVA: What do you mean by “new school?”
CP: “New school” was the headline of an initiative that Mehedev and others used to describe the priority they were giving to modernising their schools
system. In terms of the approaches we presented, and in very simple terms, this is the interrelationship between ‘smart’ technology, people and curriculum
and space, but considered at scale. I guess what you may well refer to as blended learning, but how to bring to scale. Far too often each of these elements
is considered in isolation and then people act surprised when the type of learning experiences intended for students are inhibited by the design of space.
lookred® are unashamedly in the ‘smart technology’ space but the conversation needs to be about learning. There are strong educational reasons for looking
at the inter-relationship between these elements. There are also strong economic arguments and on the back end of the BSF programme we did a lot of work
with architects, town planners and financiers to consider a range of possibilities.
TVA: As you showed at the BETT seminar, you’ve got a pretty good story now.
lookred® now has a story that goes all the way from national level down through federation of schools to single school to teacher and learner. The insights
that can be derived once you turn data into meaningful information are significant and, in my view, are set to accelerate change in education.