West London Zone Dashboards go live!
By Bridget Suthersan, Senior Data Analyst
Today is a big day for West London Zone – the day that the first of our partner dashboards go live. The partner dashboards are the culmination of eighteen months of partner consultation, design work, and data collation, and all of us here at West London Zone are really excited to see how they are received by our partners.
The WLZ ‘dashboards’ are visual representations of our attendance and engagement data. After each support session, partners are asked to report to West London Zone on whether or not a student attended the session, and, if they did, whether or not they felt the student was engaged. Partners report this information to WLZ, where it is cleaned, collated, and programmed into the dashboard. We strive to deliver the best possible support for our children and young people, and having up-to-date data that we can all rely on and respond to collectively is a vital part of that ambition.
This blog provides a step by step demonstration of how the dashboards work. Our partners might want to refer back here when using them, and hopefully other organisations might consider how we have approached the task of visualising data when they come to do something similar.
WLZ has invested resources in retaining in-house data and programming capacity, specifically to ensure that we retain flexibility and responsiveness to partners’ data needs. We’re keen to hear what you think, and if they are useful to you, so please leave any comments below or contact our Senior Data Analyst, Bridget Suthersan. If you’d like to see how the dashboards work for yourself, you can see a demonstration dashboard at: https://bsuthersan.shinyapps.io/wlz_partner_dashboard_demonstration/
The password for accessing the dashboards is ‘collective’. All data shown here, including names, is fake and solely for demonstrative purposes.
1) Firstly, and most importantly, the dashboards are password protected. Partners will always have to enter a password before they can view any data.
2) In the attendance tab, partners can see all the attendance data, as well as those students who had an authorised absence from the session. This data can be filtered by date or student name.
3) The corresponding engagement data appears in the engagement tab, which can also be filtered by date or by student name.
4) A figure for total attendance for the partner is also available, and again this can be filtered by date.
5) In the data management centre, partners can see all the sessions that they are required to submit data for. The table can be reorganised and searched.
6) Finally, the download data button allows partners to download all the data underpinning the dashboards. This data can be filtered by date before downloading, if required.
West London Zone is committed to continuous improvement, and in the coming weeks we’ll be seeking partner feedback on the dashboards, so we can continue to refine and develop the dashboards. Watch this space!
