Time never stands still when it comes to teaching and learning, and Earwig is constantly evolving to ensure that teachers and school leaders have the tools they need to optimise outcomes and minimise workload.

So our team of software developers have been busy over the last year making sure that Earwig stays ahead of the game, with a few new features and a lot of work to make sure that the existing ones work better.  Here are a few of the things we introduced or improved for you this school year …

THE PARENT APP

Parents could always view their children’s photos and videos online. Now there is a dedicated Earwig app for parents to keep them posted when each new Earwig record hits their child’s timeline.

Another feature to improve parent engagement further, with minimal work from school staff.

THE FRAMEWORK FINDER

The Earwig Assessment Library now has more than 300 different frameworks to choose from.  Open any framework, right down to each individual statement to decide whether you want that one, or something like it.  We have built more than 100 new frameworks this year.

EARWIG LITE

Earwig LITE is a lower cost package designed for SENCOs in mainstream schools.  So 10,000 more schools can benefit from the Earwig technology to improve pupil tracking and reduce stress for those teaching pupils with special needs, wherever they teach.

TRACKING REPORT

The new version of the Tracking Report – a ‘one-click’ report showing progress term by term in a vivid format, has proved very popular this year.  If you haven’t tried it, go to the Track screen and click on the REPORT button under the name of any pupil in the grid. It’s full configurable, just like all our other report formats, so you can make it look just the way you want.

INDIVIDUAL RECORDS ILLUSTRATE REPORTS

Now you can add selected pupil records from each pupil’s timeline to add texture and colour to your year-end and other reports – or let Earwig do it automatically for you.

Another way to make your outputs more professional with less effort.

BETTER ANALYTICS FOR SCHOOLWIDE EHCP PROGRESS

EHCP progress measurement is all about individualised targets.  So producing meaningful school or class-wide year-on-year data analytics for this is very difficult. Our new ‘one click’ report covers any class, key stage or group and should save the assessment coordinator a week of their holiday!

A MORE STABLE AND FASTER PLATFORM

Although we say it ourselves, Earwig is far and away the best SEN teaching evidence and pupil tracking software package in the world. This is because it is always evolving.  This is good for schools, but the other side of this agile development style is that sometimes the system has been a bit ‘temperamental’.  This was highlighted by the server failure which led to an agonising three day downtime back in March.

To fix this, we have moved the whole system over to Amazon Web Services which is the biggest cloud server setup on the planet.  This means that we can expand and contract our capacity at will and should ensure greater stability and also faster page load speeds.