WELLBEING Data for data’s sake?
MARK SOLOMONS, founder of triple ERA Award-winning Welbee and education-first AI tool Edu Intelligence, part of the Faria Education Group, argues that the fastest way to cut data workload is not collecting less, but letting technology do the heavy lifting.
That is data for data’s sake. Not because the data isn’t valuable, but because it stops at a point before it becomes useful.
The what, the why, and what next?
The technology has moved on quickly. AI tools can now connect directly to the systems schools already use: the MIS, learning platforms, assessment trackers, and anything else with an open API. They can also read unstructured information, such as improvement plans, policies, meeting minutes and survey results, which is where much of the real story sits.
Once it is all connected, the analysis happens for you, continuously, and staff can ask questions of it in plain English. That means they can see: • Patterns and across attendance, behaviour, attainment and wellbeing that no single system would show.
• Correlations, such as a dip in attendance linked to a timetable change, or behaviour spikes in a block of lessons.
• The impact of actions, so you can ask whether a specific intervention or policy change has made a difference and get an answer within minutes.
• Individual pupils whose attendance, pastoral notes and progress together suggest they need support now.
From trust or school strategy to a single child, nobody should have to copy anything into a new spreadsheet or system first.
Why this is a wellbeing issue A
sk any middle or senior leader to open a tracking spreadsheet and walk you through it. You will find tabs, colour coding, a few formulas only one person understands, and often at least one column nobody can explain. Then ask how long it took to build, and what it told them that they did not already suspect.
Schools are not short of data. Attainment, attendance, behaviour, pastoral logs, SEND provision maps, intervention records, survey results. The problem is rarely the data itself. It is what we ask people to do with it: export it, copy it, clean it, reconcile it, chart it and then try to work out what it means.
The hours we don’t count
In 2018, the Teacher Workload Advisory Group’s report Making data work said it saw no reason for a school to have more than two or three attainment data collection points a year. Sam Sims, Education Researcher and Associate Professor at the UCL Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities, estimated that each data drop takes a teacher around three hours, and that 88% of teachers worked in schools doing them termly or more often.
Add the time middle and senior leaders spend analysing those numbers, and you have one of the biggest hidden wellbeing drains on the profession. The DfE’s latest Working lives of teachers and leaders survey still shows full- time teachers averaging over 50 hours a week, with only 26% finding their workload acceptable. Too much of that data time is spent on tasks a machine can now do in minutes.
The dashboard trap
Many schools and trusts have invested in dashboards. Some refresh daily from the MIS through tools such as Power BI. Others update when the next data drop lands, by which point the picture can be weeks old. Fresh or not, every dashboard has the same limit. It shows you what has happened. Year 9 attendance is down. Reading scores in Year 4 have stalled. Behaviour incidents are up. But a dashboard cannot tell you why, or what to do about it. And you cannot ask it a question.
“We started a new reading intervention in Year 4 after Easter. Is there any evidence it has made a difference?” Finding the answer means someone cross-referencing different systems, the intervention log and a folder of meeting notes.
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www.education-today.co.uk
Low-value data work chips away at wellbeing because it takes time, removes autonomy and can feel pointless. People stop believing the numbers go anywhere.
When the collating and analysis is done automatically, the job changes. The head of year spends more time talking to students, not building a chart about them. The SENCO sees which provision is working without spending a weekend on a provision map. The senior leader walks into a meeting knowing the why, not just the what, along with suggested actions, making decisions easier and quicker.
Data collected once, used immediately and fed back to the people who entered it is no longer data for data’s sake. It is data doing its job.
What leaders can do now
You do not need to rip up your systems. You do need to question how data moves around your school or trust. • Count the hours. Ask staff how much time they spend moving, copying and analysing data each half term.
• Stop the retyping. If information already lives in your MIS, tracker or other system, nobody should have to enter it elsewhere.
• Ask whether your systems can talk. Ask suppliers whether your platforms have open APIs. If they cannot share data, they are part of the workload problem.
• Test your dashboards. Pick one action you took last term and ask whether your dashboard can tell you if it worked. If it cannot, it is a report, not an insight.
• Look beyond the numbers. Your documents, action plans and survey results hold context spreadsheets never will.
• Give the time back. When technology removes a task, cancel it visibly.
Data is not the enemy of staff wellbeing. Manual data is. Ask your team this: how many hours did we spend last half term preparing and analysing data, and how many hours acting on it? If the first number is bigger than the second, the problem is not your staff, or even your data. It is the way you are handling it.
For further information and practical advice, visit: u
https://welbee.co.uk
October 2026
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