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The Prep Praise Portal

David Guild

Character Development is one of the three key distinctives of a King’s School education. At King’s, this character development is based on instilling eight core values in each of our students. While we can explicitly explain what each of the School Values are, it can be challenging to assess how well our students are able to demonstrate these values in their daily lives. The gathering of data about positive student behaviour would be a useful tool for assessing the character development of King’s students.

At The King’s School, Preparatory School, we do a good job of collecting data on student behaviour. However, nearly all the data collected pertains to the recording and reporting of negative behaviours exhibited by our students. There is very little data collected about the positive behaviours that students are exhibiting. Students are rewarded by teachers with Excellence Awards when they behave in a positive manner but the names of the recipients and what they are being rewarded for were not stored in a centralised database. Thus, reporting about a student’s character development was challenging, as there was a reliance on anecdotal records and teacher opinion when making character-based judgments.

The creation of an online reporting tool housed on the KingsNet platform, known as The Prep Praise Portal, has helped to create a database of positive student behaviour at school. The portal allows both staff and students to log the positive student behavioural choices they see at school. The portal gives students agency over the process, as they are actively encouraged by staff to nominate students they observe behaving positively at school.

The data gathered from The Prep Praise Portal is regularly disseminated through automated reports to various stakeholders including the Prep Executive, Housemasters and teachers and provides valuable insights into students’ wellbeing and character development. The information recorded on the portal is also used to help reward those students who are demonstrating positive behaviours in the form of House Distinction awards. These rewards help students to feel acknowledged for their good behaviour and, hopefully, inspire other students to act as Kingsmen.

We already had an online behaviour database at the Prep School that provided staff with readily available means to report incidents of negative behaviour as they occurred. Using this database as a starting point, and with the assistance of the School’s ICT Department, I was able to design a straightforward online form that sat as a quick link for staff and students on the KingsNet landing page. The use of KingsNet also meant that scheduled automated reports can be sent to the various stakeholders in the form of an Excel spreadsheet so they can see which students had been nominated recently on the platform.

After sharing the portal with various stakeholders and refining the language used on the page, the portal was rolled out on a trial basis with staff and our Stage 3 students. The uptake and engagement from staff has been pleasing and their feedback on the portal has been overwhelmingly positive. Most pleasingly, the students themselves are eager to nominate and reward their peers for the positive behaviour they are demonstrating. There were some initial teething problems with students nominating themselves, but these were easily ironed out by using KingsNet to track who was making the nominations. We are now in the process of rolling out the portal to our Stage 2 students.

In order to assess how our students’ characters are developing, it is necessary to continuously gather and analyse data on both the positive and negative behaviours our students are exhibiting. The Prep Praise Portal has enabled the Prep School to gather a vast amount of relevant and meaningful data on which of our students are consistently demonstrating the School Values in their interactions with others. With a successful trial of the portal underway at Prep, there is an opportunity to roll out similar platforms across the School’s other campuses.