The huge variety of special needs evidenced by children mean that every special school or unit is unique in one way or another. But When it comes to teaching evidence and pupil assessment, there two activities which are common to all schools in the UK.  They all need to

1             Capture, manage and present teaching evidence.

So they need the Earwig Evidence Module

2             Assess, track and report on pupil performance

For this, they need the Earwig Assessment Module

Beyond this core functionality, Earwig has developed a suite of additional facilities, almost all designed specifically for special schools, always at the request of one or more client schools, who see the value in doing as much as possible with one software package.

This outlines these additional facilities and any additional costs, so you can decide which ones are appropriate for your school.

1: ASSESSMENT MODULE – ADDITIONAL FRAMEWORKS

When you sign up for the Assessment Module you get access to more than 200 curricula and assessment schemes in the Earwig Library.

In order to make it easier to find frameworks that might suit your pupils, we have created the Earwig Framework Finder. This makes finding the right suite of performance assessment tools for your school so much easier.  You will find notes about each scheme and can open each one out to see every subject, topic and target.

You can also consult with and Earwig expert and then select as many frameworks from this list as you need.

If you use your own assessment structure, you can also ask us to build a custom framework specifically for your school.

The Framework Finder can be found here.

2: Parent Launch

One of the most attractive features of Earwig to most schools is the facility to share timelines with parents to engage them more in their children’s education.  Needless to say, Ofsted are always impressed with this feature.

Typically, Earwig is ‘launched’ to parents one or two terms after staff start creating records.

Earwig will provide you with a leaflet to inform parents and other collateral for the launch.

The £100 per year charge covers the cost of providing customer support for parents.

3: Parent Observations

With this module parents can create Earwig records to add evidence of their child’s activity at home.

These are added to each pupil’s timeline to provide a fuller picture of that child’s development.

This also provides parents with a deeper sense of involvement and a sense of partnership in their child’s learning journey.

4: The Homework Module

The fullest extension of the parent involvement feature set is the Homework Module. This enables teachers to specify work to be done at home, which parents can curate.

It also provides opportunities for ongoing discussions with parents about work generally or specific homework tasks.

5: Therapist Module

If your school uses outside professionals, like therapists you can provide tham with access to all the Earwig facilities, but limit their access to the specific pupils that they are dealing with.

This access is managed by the school Earwig Admins.

6: Curated staff Module

Some school like to have senior staff monitor the record created by junior staff to ensure that they are correct before these are ‘published’ as complete records.

The junior staff are flagged as ‘Curated’ by school Earwig Admins.  Their records are highlighted for review in the Record List and these staff can only see their own records until they become full staff users.

7: Test Scores Module

Most special schools employ therapists. For some, it would be helpful if all the therapists could add their test data and pupil observations to the central data repository that is Earwig.  This includes as many varieties of test as required and includes raw scores, standardised scores, indicative age scores, etc. and relevant charts to illustrate progress.

By next year, this data can be collated into integrated reports on each pupil, which include formative assessment data and test scores.

This may require an online training session for the relevan staff.

8: Behaviour Module

This module is still under development and has been designed in consultation with a test panel of special schools.

It will allow staff to use the Earwig facility to record behaviour of individual pupils, show interventions and track the effectiveness of remedies.

Expected Autumn 2020.

9: Safeguarding Module

This is a further development of the Behaviour Module.  It will allow detailed recording, alerts for appropriate staff in specified situations.  The data is accessible by selected staff and allow all the necessary reporting, evidence and long termanalysis.

Available early 2021.

10: Porfolio Module

This module allows staff to create ‘Projects’ for pupils to work on.  Pupils can then create their own records and apply these to each project.

Pupils can work in teams and each project and record has its own chat facility, so teachers can manage pupil work remotely and schools can illustrate the value of teacher input as each project develops.

Ideal for remote learning.

11: Blog Support Module

Most schools run a school blog. The Blog Module allows staff to send records which contain images or video clips which might be appropriate for the school blog to the designated Blog Editor and provides them with a facility to either extract this to create a separate blog or add a blog entry to the parent dashboard.

12: Free Parent Plus for Parents

Once you have launched to parents, each parent can view their child’s timeline, going back twelve months.  They also get low resolution copies of the images and a gallery to store these.  However, if they want to download high resolution images for printing they can purchase these for £2 each, with video clips at £3 each. Alternatively, they can upgrade to ‘Parent Plus’ and get unlimited downloads and go back as far as they want.

Some schools feel that they would rather subscribe to Parent Plus on behalf of all their parents.

This will add only £2 per parent per year to your licence fee.

SUMMARY

These are the modules currently available.  If you would like to add any of these to your school account just tell your consultant or customer services (info@earwigacademic.com).

All of these modules have been created as result of some teacher saying ‘Wouldn’t it be good if Earwig could also do this?.  If you have a ‘Wouldn’t it be good.’ Moment, please be sure to share it with us.

Here is a summarised list of modules and prices for your file.