(openPR) - Innovative e-portfolio solution will give parents direct access to their children’s educational development, help raise achievement and comply with new upcoming Government guidelines

09 March, 2009 – Barkston and Syston CE Primary School will deploy Paragon, a web-based performance monitoring and management tool to give parents direct access to their children’s educational development, helping them to provide support and raise achievement by being more involved in their children’s education as outlined by new Government regulations coming into effect next year.

Developed by e-portfolio specialist Vantage Technologies, Paragon supports pupils’ development and learning requirements by allowing teachers to record evidence of their academic and behavioural performance in an easy-to-access portfolio, which can be accessed by parents.

This gives parents direct online access to an up-to-date record of their children’s performance and facilitates further involvement in their educational development by allowing them to review and comment on information about their child.

Andy Canadine, class teacher and ICT co-ordinator at Barkston and Syston CE Primary School, said: “I first came across Paragon when I was working as a course tutor at another organisation where it was used as a continuous professional development tool designed to aid the teacher training process. I found the tool excellent to use and it always has positive feedback so knew it was ideal and flexible enough to be adapted to use for reporting to parents.

“Paragon will be beneficial to parents as the results they see will help them be more aware of the areas their child needs to focus on and get help with. For small primary schools that don’t have complex reporting requirements such as Barkston and Syston, Paragon is ideal as it can easily be tailored to suit the needs of the individual school – making it as simple or as complex as necessary. This flexibility also makes it affordable for smaller schools with smaller budgets.”

A key benefit of Paragon is its flexibility. It can easily be tailored to meet the needs of any school looking to gather, monitor and manage information. For both parents and teachers the solution is ideal as it’s user-friendly, informative and above all, secure. While teaching staff have a higher level of access, parents are only able to access information concerning their own child; this helps ensure there is no breach of confidentiality or unauthorised access.

In addition to security and ease of use, Paragon offers schools a cost-effective and easy to deploy solution which enables them to fall in line with new Government regulations termed: exploiting ICT to improve parental engagement, which are designed to involve parents in their children’s education through the use of ICT, and will come into effect for all secondary schools in 2010 and all primary schools in 2012.

Paragon lets teachers upload and store information about a pupil’s academic work, behaviour and attendance in a single location securely accessible by both parents and teachers, over the Internet at anytime. Parents can login via any PC with an Internet connection to assess their child’s progress. Schools are currently focussing on using ICT to monitor children’s literacy and numeracy.

Andy Canadine continues: “The beauty of Paragon is that it is an evolutionary tool and can be developed further as and when it is required. Vantage have been extremely helpful with the development of our bespoke solution and their consultative approach is helping ensure we get exactly what we want from the tool.”

Barkston and Syston CE Primary School will liaise with parents regarding the criteria and targets which will be built into Paragon and plan to pilot the solution with a selection of pupils after Easter; they hope to have it deployed across the whole school by September. The primary school will use Paragon in addition to traditional parent and teacher evenings to keep parents abreast of their children’s progression.

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About Vantage Technologies Limited
Vantage Technologies Limited is an IT services and solutions company, founded in 1988, specialising in the delivery of innovative software solutions for the improvement of working practice. Vantage is active in a variety of market sectors including local authorities, healthcare, police and professional institutions. Its product portfolio of web-based solutions includes risk management, professional development and e-learning. For further information visit: www.vantage-technologies.co.uk

Issued on behalf of Vantage Technologies, contact 01142 479500
Press contact: Context, Priya Mistry
T: 01625 511966
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