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 Comparison and Analysis of Special Pupil Attainment

Key features of CASPA

For a single-page executive summary of the key features of  CASPA in Adobe Acrobat PDF format, click here; for other useful documents, please follow the link to the Downloads section of the CASPA website.

What is CASPA?

CASPA is a simple and intuitive tool for the analysis and evaluation of attainment and progress for pupils with Special Educational Needs.  It supports your school's self-evaluation and school improvement activities by providing intelligent and user-friendly interpretation of assessments and targets for individual pupils, for cohorts of pupils within your school and at whole-school level.  CASPA makes use of existing data wherever possible, including the historic data required to track progress over time, thus ensuring you derive maximum benefit from your data for minimum administrative effort.

CASPA allows the attainment and progress of your pupils to be bench-marked against the attainment and progress of other children of the same age, level of prior attainment and categories of Special Educational Need, using comparative data based on the analysis of results submitted to us by users of CASPA.  CASPA's analysis and bench-marking therefore takes account of the circumstances of individual pupils, both for the review of historic progress as well as when considering targets for future progress.  By providing a robust and reliable measure of progress and identifying potential areas of concern, CASPA allows schools to take appropriate actions to improve outcomes for pupils.

• CASPA - a system designed by SEN practitioners to meet the needs of SEN practitioners;
• Covers assessment outcomes both at P Scales and at National Curriculum levels up to Level 8;
• Includes all Core and Foundation subjects as well as the Personal and Social Development aspects;
• Is relevant to any establishment which has pupils with defined Special Educational Needs:
  • Special schools
  • Mainstream schools, Special Units and Resourced Provision
  • Pupil Referral Units

What CASPA delivers

As well as being a repository for all of the assessment data and evidence required to support the judgements you make about your pupils, CASPA includes a powerful analysis and bench-marking engine to provide the intelligent reporting required to meet the differing needs of audiences as diverse as:

• parents and pupils
• teachers and subject leaders
• head teachers, governors and the senior leadership team
• advisors, inspectors, SIPs and other external agencies.

For further information about analysis and bench-marking in CASPA and for examples of the reporting available in CASPA for individual pupils, for groups of pupils and for the whole school, please click here.

Maximum output for minimum input

As a company, we are committed to the principle that data should be entered once and used many times. To minimise the administrative workload involved in gaining access CASPA's intelligent reporting, CASPA  makes use of existing data wherever possible; pupil records in CASPA are created and refreshed by electronic import of data from all types of school MIS and assessment data in electronic form, including both results and targets for one and two years ahead, can be imported from a wide variety of sources, including:

• B Squared - (for more information, click here)
• PIVATS - (for more information, click here)
• BAREonline - (for more information, click here)
• Common Transfer Files - (for more information, click here)
• SIMS Assessment Manager 7 - (for more information, click here)
• Excel spreadsheets - (for more information, click here)

With CASPA, there is no waiting for analysis results to be returned to you after assessment data has been entered or imported; as soon as you enter or import your first assessment result into CASPA, CASPA's intelligent analysis and bench-marking features will immediately start deliver valuable information.

You can also use CASPA to generate estimates for targets to inform target-setting activities within schools. CASPA will provide an estimate for the progress of each child in each subject based on their assessments and using the benchmark data to inform the estimate.

Reliable analysis

We understand that reliable analysis requires reliable assessment results.  To support the assessment activities within your school, to help improve the consistency and quality of assessment, and to support the requirement for evidence to support the assessments you make for your pupils, CASPA includes:

• Tools to ensure that the assessments you make for your pupils are consistent with one another
• Portfolios of moderated work in multi-media format to provide a fixed reference to support your moderation activities
• The ability to record evidence in multi-media format to support the judgements you are making about your pupils

A tool to support both schools and Local Authorities

Where CASPA is licensed to a Local Authority, CASPA is delivered as two separate modules: the school data collection module of CASPA, designed to be installed in each school, and the Local Authority module, designed for a single central installation:

• The school module is used by school staff for data collection, analysis and reporting.
• The Local Authority module of CASPA replicates all of the reporting and analysis functionality of the school module, and allows all analysis and reporting to be run for a single school or all schools; the local authority module allows the authority to collect data from its schools to carry out authority-wide analysis and is also used to submit anonymised data for analysis to generate the comparative data set used by CASPA.

For more information on how the school and local authority modules work together, please click here.

Simple and intuitive

Whilst CASPA may be a powerful piece of software, feedback from users tells us they find CASPA to be simple and intuitive; to back up our careful design, CASPA is delivered with an extremely comprehensive context-sensitive Help system as well as a number of other resources to assist users.

CASPA in summary

By making use of existing data wherever possible, CASPA offers a low-cost system that allows you to bench-mark pupils' progress to provide clear and unambiguous evidence to support judgements about how well each pupil is progressing, thereby allowing schools to identify appropriate actions to improve outcomes where necessary.

For a single-page executive summary of the key features of  CASPA in Adobe Acrobat PDF format, click here; for other useful documents, follow the link to the Downloads section of the CASPA website.