Bett 2022 was back after a two-and-a-bit year hiatus. Whilst footfall was clearly down a bit, particularly for schools who are still dealing admirably with the day-to-day challenges of Covid-19, it was still a busy, rewarding, and hectic few days.
Our Assembly Education team headed off to Excel London to represent Community Brands UK along with the Parentapps team. There was a buzz around our CBUK stand as the teams spoke to staff from schools, academies and MATs about our Assembly data analytics products. Coming as it did a few days before the new school white paper, with the pre-hinted goal of all schools joining a MAT by 2030, we were busy with MAT leaders discussing how our tools can support them in their growing trusts.
Our conversations ranged from supporting relatively small Multi-Academy Trusts in building a single, live, overview of their academy data to discussing the future of predictive analytics with Microsoft and some of the biggest MATs in the country. It’s clear that Multi-Academy Trusts want and need a detailed descriptive analytics solution that allows their central and school leaders to make quality data-driven decisions, with responsive tools offering more detail than their MIS can offer.
Trust data teams across the country have been experimenting with PowerBI a great deal over the last two years. We spoke to many who knew what they wanted to achieve in terms of delivering responsive, descriptive dashboards, but had begun to understand what a complex job it is to build these from scratch, particularly in sourcing and manipulating the raw data from MIS and 3rd party applications.
We worked with MATs and International School Group communities to discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by Open Education Analytics alongside Microsoft at Bett. It was an exciting opportunity to break down the barriers to adoption through effective collaboration within the sector over the next couple of months.
Bett is also a hugely important opportunity for the industry to meet, talk and collaborate. It’s easy to underestimate how important this side of the event is. We took the opportunity to meet with some of our current collaborators, such as the fabulous Welbee and CPOMS teams. Alongside this, chance meetings in the sandwich queues and elsewhere should hopefully lead to further collaboration with other providers in the near future. The serendipity of such meetings just doesn’t happen away from big get-togethers like BETT.
If you didn’t have a chance to catch us at BETT, we would love to talk to you about Assembly at one of the events we will be attending this year. Find us next at the Schools and Academies Show on April 27th in London, Stand D26!
Find some photos of our brilliant team at Bett below…
