BounceTogether Case Study | Werneth School

Why were you interested in using BounceTogether in your school?

There were 3 reasons in particular that made us keen to work with BounceTogether.

Pupil and staff mental wellbeing

The wellbeing of our pupils and staff is at the forefront of our school's ethos. We were keen to build on our existing approach by regularly engaging students and staff on their feelings and to create open and safe lines of communication.

Parent feedback and engagement

Communicating with parents and listening to their views is a critical part of our school being able to improve. Consequently we were keen to build a system to regularly seek the views of parents - and not only rely on parents evening other similar events.

Student voice and communication

Being able to regularly communicate and listen to all students across our school is a core value of our school - “Know our children well”. We are always seeking new ways that we can improve the communication with our pupils.

Rob explains "When we met with the team from Bounce, we quickly realised the software met all of our initial criteria and would be a great fit for our school. The setup was really straightforward, Bounce took care of most of it for us and there was next to no intervention needed from our IT team".

Exceeding expectations

Shortly after we started to see the benefits of using Bounce in our school, COVID-19, like for other schools in the UK, meant we had to completely re-think how we deliver education to students.
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We quickly realised that we could in fact use BounceTogether in so many more ways than we had originally imagined. We decided to create a survey for parents that enabled us to check in on the mental and physical wellbeing of our students during lockdown and also evaluate the remote learning programmes we had in place during Covid19.

Within 2 weeks of sending the survey out to parents (we used SMS/email to do this), we had well over 700 responses! This was a fantastic return rate and proved to us that parents are really willing to engage in this type of communication. The vast majority of the responses we got from the survey were overwhelmingly positive!

"We had hundreds of positive comments back from parents explaining how well the school had handled the lockdown. This was extremely gratifying as everyone has worked hard to uphold our high standards of education and gave a real boost to our staff body".

What this also did was flag up issues such as students not being able to log into certain programmes, which enabled the right person in school to quickly contact these students and enable them to continue to work remotely from home.

Bounce across the whole school

Bounce has been fantastic on a personal level, within my role! At PE level, we can now conduct student voice activities for all year groups and can use this information to plan a targeted intervention programme and also adjust our curriculum to meet the needs of specific cohorts of students.

It also enabled us to evaluate extra curricular attendance over the course of the year. As BounceTogether is fully integrated with our school management system, we could then filter this data down by year group and key demographics within school (e.g. pupil premium, EAL). Attempting to do this manually would have cost hours of staff time. Again, this has shown fantastic results and allowed us to implement intervention strategies.

Rob says "Bounce has been incredibly valuable in my role with the Manchester United Foundation and we have been able to evaluate all the programmes that our Man Utd Hub Officer runs. Again, this has shown fantastic results and allowed us to implement intervention strategies"

Another example comes from our Man Utd literacy programme, where our hub officer has 2 groups of 15 Y9 boys for twice weekly sessions. The survey we assigned to these students highlighted they really enjoyed the sessions, felt more confident with their reading and were also more positive when returning to English lessons.

One of the Key questions during the survey was "Do you read for pleasure at home"? The results from this question were dominated by a 'NO' response. Our Hub Officer was quickly able to pick up on this and as a result he encouraged the boys to start reading matchday programmes, the back of Newspapers on the sport section and also the BBC Sport website.

Without realising it, the boys on the programme were suddenly reading from home regularly and enjoying it at the same time! We know that BounceTogether also provides a specialised “attitude to reading” survey and our literacy team are about to start using it to understand more about our reading provision.

In summary

BounceTogether is helping our school in so many different ways. It’s not just a great tool for quickly gaining student voice and feedback across our whole School - it has enabled us to deliver planned and targeted intervention strategies, which we can then further re-evaluate using BounceTogether further down the line.

The results we gather through the software are amazing and we know that the wellbeing surveys included with Bounce are validated and tested, which means we don’t even need to create our own! The results are presented in a variety of formats, which can be instantly summarised and shared with the relevant people in school to help in school improvement planning. We are finding more and more uses for BounceTogether the more we use it and we have seen several new features introduced already that we are now taking advantage of. The team at BounceTogether have been a pleasure to work with from day one.

Werneth School - Case Study