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Becky Hill worked as an accountant before moving into education, joining a large Derbyshire secondary school as data officer, and then moving to a similar role at St Ralph Sherwin Catholic Multi Academy Trust, a 25-school trust.

In 2023 she joined Halliard Trust, an 11-school MAT based in Cheshire, as data, intelligence and impact manager - which was, at the time, a brand new role for the trust. She tells Tes about a typical week in the role.

Sharing data trends with the trust

Obviously, I work with data. We’re swimming in data. What I do is filtering. I look for the patterns, the trends, the key things that our data is telling us, and then I feed that intelligence to our school improvement team, trustees, local government bodies, headteachers and schools.

This means I have a lot of meetings, typically four or five a day.

Each of our secondary schools has its own data manager, who I work closely with. Every fortnight we have a school improvement meeting together. I also meet often with our school business managers.

At other times I spot something that needs to be acted on straight away. For example, one school’s attendance has declined over the last few weeks. When I noticed that, I went straight to the school improvement lead, who will ask questions on their next visit, and think about how to support the school.

I also present to bigger groups; for example, at the headteachers’ meeting. Previously, I had noticed we were having a real issue with the attendance of disadvantaged pupils, even though attendance generally was where it should be. It was apparent across the organisation, so it was right that I brought the whole trust into the conversation.

Writing data reports

I’m responsible for writing regular reports that go to the board. I always try to present data on one page if I can - I don’t want to produce reams and reams of information. It’s about the key headlines.

So when I build a report on the latest picture on exclusions, for example, it’s as easy as possible for our staff to understand, even those who aren’t data specialists.

I also produce reports for a local governing body (LGB). At the moment we have a school that is particularly focusing on attendance, so the chair of the LGB asked me to pull together a monthly report so they can support and challenge the school, and hopefully see improvements.

It’s my role to make sure those different stakeholders are able to ask the right questions about what’s going on - what the issue is and how we’ll fix it - because they have a good understanding of the situation, thanks to the data.

As well as attendance, I look closely at data on assessment to see how our students are doing. All the primary data comes in at the end of January, the secondary data at the end of February, and then, of course, there are our GCSE and A-level groups as well.

Last year, at primary, we had a particular issue with computing, where attainment was much lower than in other subjects. We delved into that and did some cross-phase work with a computing specialist from a secondary. It was amazing, this time around, to be able to look at the data and say: “This is the impact our work had.”

It’s always about showing the difference we’re making. It’s not just data for the sake of data - it’s data that we’ve used intelligently.

Visiting schools

I work hybrid, about 80 per cent of the time at home and 20 per cent in in-person meetings or on school visits.

Last Thursday I went to visit one school that I felt needed some extra support around reporting and using our new management information system. I could feel that they were starting to lose some of the ability to see what was happening on the ground in schools, because they weren’t used to the new system.

I spent some time with the data manager, admin team and attendance manager to make sure they are able to get the information they need.

I’ve also been working with our primary schools on their reports for parents. They’ve always done them on paper, which is very time-consuming. I’ve been assisting them as they move over to electronic reporting, pulling data straight from the system on to the report, which we now have all schools doing.

We’ve had some great feedback on the amount of time that has saved teachers.

Spot checks for accuracy

I must make sure we have a clean data service, so I do a lot of checking for accuracy. The worst thing we could be doing is reporting on something that isn’t right.

I haven’t got the capacity to check everything, but I go in and make spot checks, making sure that student codes are correct and so on. Then, when we are using the data strategically, we can be confident that it’s accurate.

Assisting with Ofsted inspections

Sometimes I have to drop everything to be on hand for a school that is being inspected.

For example, they might need some analysis around suspensions data - not just the number of suspensions but drilling into the groups that have been suspended.

I’m on hand to help with those deep-dive questions from inspectors about data that the schools wouldn’t necessarily have to hand.

In these situations, it’s my job to work quickly and efficiently to give the schools what they need.

What would I change about the role if I could?

My capacity. I’d love to develop a team, so that I could delegate and spend more time out and about because it’s so rewarding to be in the schools, seeing the impact of our work.

Becky Hill was speaking to Ellen Peirson-Hagger

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