Patterns
See what is shifting across the trust
Start with reporting if you need a clean view of marker distribution, appraiser consistency, or differences between schools and staff groups.
Guidance Suite
Current route:Organisation
Move between role journeys, reference tools, and source materials without losing your place.
Routes
Maps & Pathways Guidance
Organisation Journey
Turn individual meetings into trust-wide visibility
This route shows how the platform supports more consistent manager practice, better reporting, and clearer organisational insight beyond the individual meeting.
3
Reporting lenses
6
Wider capability areas
Configurable
Local language and data
Start Here
Choose the lens that matches the decision in front of you
This route is busiest when read straight through. It becomes much easier to use if you enter through the question you are actually trying to answer.
Operations
Keep the rollout workable over time
Start with operational controls if you are thinking about permissions, completion, bulk changes, leavers, or how leaders act on the data.
Growth Model
Connect appraisal to development and support
Start with wider capabilities if you want appraisal insight to feed training, opportunity pathways, 360 feedback, reflective tools, and local help content.
Leadership Priorities
Why the organisational view matters
The value is not just that meetings are easier to run. It is that the organisation can see more clearly what those meetings are telling it.
- Reduce the admin burden of document-heavy appraisal processes.
- Create a more consistent manager experience across the organisation.
- Generate insight that supports talent, retention, and succession decisions.
- Tailor language, fields, and workflow around the trust's operating model.
Reporting And Calibration
Move from individual meetings to trust-wide insight
Once the conversations are in one place, leaders can start spotting patterns instead of relying on local memory and isolated judgement.
Pattern
Heat maps and calibration
See where markers are clustering, compare appraisers or schools, and drill into outliers by marker type, date range, staffing group, or any configured slider dimensions that help explain the pattern.
Analysis
Distribution curves and tables
Look at patterns through charts and exportable tables using the profile fields your organisation has chosen to capture.
Access
Role-scoped views
Give line managers, headteachers, HR, and admins the visibility they need without treating every audience the same.
How to use the reporting well
- Choose which marker you are analysing: appraisee, appraiser, or agreed goal.
- Use date ranges, schools, staff groups, or appraisers to tighten the view.
- Read the cluster before diving into individual profiles or outliers.
- Use the same filters across heat maps, distributions, and tables to compare patterns cleanly.
- Treat reporting as a calibration tool, not just a dashboard.
What Leaders Can See
Use the right view for the question you are asking
The reporting layer is not one generic dashboard. It gives leaders different ways to read concentration, compare groups, and move from an organisational pattern into an individual record.
Heat Map
See where the organisation is clustering
The heat map view shows how markers are distributed across the trust and can be filtered by date range, marker type, appraiser, school, staff group, and leaver status.
Distribution
Read patterns through curves and parameter tables
Distribution views and exportable tables let leaders read patterns through the profile fields the trust has chosen to capture, such as job family, contract type, or demographic grouping.
Access
Filter users and managers at scale
Operational views make it easier to filter staff, track appraisal completion, inspect manager caseloads, and persist the table layout each audience needs.
Operational Control
Turn the insight into something the trust can act on
The deck goes beyond reporting screens. It also describes the practical controls that make the platform workable once schools, staff structures, and data categories start changing over time.
CalibrationMove from cluster to case+
Selecting part of the heat map can populate a second analytical view, including any configured slider outputs, helping leaders move from pattern spotting into specific people, markers, and profiles that need a closer look.
PermissionsMatch visibility to role+
Different groups can see different operational views, from line managers checking direct-report completion through to HR and trust admins working across the wider organisation.
ComparisonsCompare like with like before drawing conclusions+
Compare appraisers, schools, staffing groups, or date ranges deliberately so leaders can spot where a pattern is local and where it is trust-wide.
CompletionKeep an eye on manager workload and completion+
Manager-facing views can surface direct-report counts, appraisal completion, and opt-out patterns where the trust has chosen to enable them.
ViewsLet each audience persist the layout they need+
Operational tables can be filtered, searched, resized, reordered, and customised so working views stay useful instead of resetting every time.
Follow-throughUse reporting to trigger the next intervention+
The real value comes when a pattern in the data leads to a follow-up conversation, support offer, development action, or deeper diagnostic tool.
What this adds beyond a dashboard
The source pack makes a useful distinction here: reporting is only valuable if leaders can also change data cleanly, manage leavers, control access, and route people from a pattern on the screen to a real follow-up action.
Beyond The Map
Professional growth needs a wider operating model
The source pack is clear on this point: appraisal becomes more useful when it connects to development activity, opportunity signals, deeper feedback tools, practical help content, and cleaner people-data handling.
Develop People
Growth activity lives alongside appraisal insight
Use CPD tracking and expressions of interest to connect review conversations with development, succession, and internal opportunity planning.
See More Clearly
Bring in deeper feedback only when it helps
Use 360 and reflective tools selectively when one appraisal conversation is not enough to surface the pattern clearly.
Run Cleanly
Keep guidance, exports, and people-data handling practical
Use built-in help, bulk data workflows, and stronger leaver handling so the system stays useful after rollout, not just at launch.
Why this belongs on the website
These are not side features. They are the parts that turn a single appraisal meeting into an ongoing professional growth and organisational insight model.
What to decide before switching these layers on
- Keep option sets and terminology aligned to the trust's real operating model.
- Use 360 and reflective tools selectively, where they answer a real diagnostic need.
- Link CPD, opportunity signals, and appraisal insight so development activity is not floating separately.
- Decide early how help content, leaver coding, and reactivation should be managed.
- Treat bulk export and re-upload capability as an operational safeguard, not a substitute for clean configuration.
DevelopmentTraining and CPD+
Keep professional growth linked to real learning activity, including certificates, cost, duration, categorisation, and evaluation where needed.
- Log activity against the individual rather than in a separate spreadsheet.
- Upload evidence such as certificates where required.
- Report on cost, duration, and effectiveness over time.
ProgressionExpressions of interest+
Capture signals around promotion, secondments, internal opportunities, projects, and future career direction in one place.
- Options can be tailored to the trust's own pathways and opportunities.
- Free-text input can sit alongside preset choices.
- Interest signals can inform development and succession conversations.
Feedback360 feedback+
Run configurable 360 requests for individuals, teams, schools, or the wider trust with options around anonymity, written feedback, and grouped responses.
- Separate responses from less senior, peer, and more senior groups.
- Use marker placement as well as written feedback if that helps.
- Apply it where one appraisal conversation is not enough to surface the pattern.
InsightJohari and reflective windows+
Use deeper reflective tools to explore individual characteristics or the culture of a team, school, or whole organisation with configurable templates.
- Go beyond 360 when the trust needs a richer diagnostic view.
- Use templates as a starting point, not a fixed model.
- Apply the tool to people, teams, schools, or trust-wide culture.
OperationsExports and bulk changes+
Export tables as CSV, download full user data, and make large structural updates without having to edit every record one by one.
- Useful for recategorisation, new data fields, and school changes.
- Supports bulk amendments through download, edit, and re-upload.
- Keeps the platform workable when structures change over time.
SupportGuidance and leaver handling+
Bring local help into the system and manage leavers with more useful operational detail so the organisation keeps continuity as people move.
- Upload guidance, link to external standards, and add searchable help articles or custom videos.
- Capture layered leaver categories, exit interviews, and reassignment of direct reports.
- Reactivate returning staff where policy allows, instead of recreating their history from scratch.
Progression
Capture interest in future opportunities
Expressions of interest can surface aspiration early, from leadership pathways through to secondments, internal projects, and other local opportunities.
Feedback
Read 360 responses by relationship group
360 feedback can separate less senior, peer, and more senior responses, giving leaders a clearer view of where alignment and mismatch are emerging.
Insight
Explore reflective or cultural patterns visually
Johari or reflective-window style views can be used to explore how traits or cultural descriptors are clustering across a person, team, school, or wider organisation.
Support
Keep local guidance close to the workflow
A built-in help centre can carry searchable guidance, local workflows, standards links, and videos that reflect the trust's actual configuration and practice.
Continuity
Handle archiving and leavers cleanly
Leaver handling can capture exit categories and subreasons, support reassignment of appraisees, and preserve the record if someone later returns.
Configuration
Decisions that shape local rollout
A better rollout starts with a few deliberate decisions about language, data, and how managers will make judgements.
Shape the language around your culture+
Labels, note headings, slider names, data fields, and many interface terms are configurable so the platform can sound like your trust rather than a generic system.
Decide how performance should be judged+
Choose whether performance guidance should be more absolute or more contextualised. That decision shapes the examples and training managers work from.
Decide what leaders need to analyse+
Heat map granularity, the fields captured in user profiles, the category values inside those fields, and even which markers are analysed can all be tailored around the insight the trust actually wants.
Design access around responsibility+
Different audiences need different operational views. Be deliberate about what line managers, headteachers, HR, and organisation admins can see and act on.
Capture only the data that helps+
Most profile fields and categories are optional. Keep the model useful and proportionate, while still capturing the structure needed for reporting and later pathway work.
Decide which meeting types need the full map+
Appraisal, one-to-one, induction, and probationary meetings do not all need the same structure. Decide where marker placement is genuinely useful, and where lighter note-based workflows are enough.
Only switch on extra sliders if they create usable signal+
Up to three extra sliders can be added with configurable labels, ranges, and visibility. Use them when they feed useful discussion and reporting, not because more inputs automatically mean better insight.
Plan for change, not just steady state+
Think early about leaver coding, bulk data updates, school changes, and local help content. Those operational details shape whether rollout feels sustainable after launch.