Successful Reviewing

The review process gets better and better – we’re very heartened by the way schools are using the process. Many boards/syndicates/staff groups are reviewing at specific meetings and sending their ratings and feedback individually or as a group. We all benefit from the experience, knowledge, and  suggestions of the reviewers.


When we collate the reviews we generally end up with a number of points to follow up and we carefully consider changes we make to the topics. Before advising you of the draft topics, we normally run them past a subject matter expert which I guess we could consider another “review”. We exhort you to read the implementation reviews provided by your school community, and follow up on school specific issues raised there.


It was good to have so many reviews from parents and we want to encourage this!

We observe that there are things that some schools need to do to enhance their review process. They are:

• Check that the review instructions you give to reviewers, particularly your parent reviewers, are up to date.  You can cut and paste the instructions from your dashboard, and they are also in the topic Review Instructions. We dispensed with the passwords (bin, sin, pin) earlier this year.
• Before advising the school community of the review, check that your school specific details are correct. We’re not talking about the content of the topics, just things like roles and names, etc.
• Explain that the review is of the topic on your SchoolDocs site and advertise its URL. We still sometimes get people reviewing from the Demo site or Model site (neither of which contains your school specific material).