Endorsement: How using MERiT can inform your teaching

Debbie McAllister is a Maths teacher at The Bewdley School in Bewdley, Worcestershire. Here, Debbie explains how her department uses MERiT to identify learning gaps.

I have only been using MERiT for the last 12 months, but it has been a really useful tool for the department for several years now and it’s something I’ll continue to use.

How does my school compare to others?

The obvious use of MERiT is to analyse mock exam results, but we’ve used it this year to get a wider view of how we’re comparing as a whole to other schools in the area and nationally. We use the information from MERiT alongside our own data tracking to give us an oversight into national data and how we can use it to compare and identify areas of need.

What are the learning areas we need to develop?

Our primary use of MERiT this year was to see how our maths department compares against other local schools. However, as MERiT shows us, very clearly, the gaps in our students’ understanding, right down to question-level it’s also enabled us to use the data in a slightly different way. The MERiT reports reveal whether there is a whole-class misconception or if individual interventions are needed. This, in turn, means we can target and focus our teaching and learning, not just for the current cohort, but for future year groups too. Plugging these gaps really helps to motivate the students.

MERiT is so easy to use

MERiT is extremely user-friendly. It’s efficient and clear and enables us to check and recheck marking and scores from data we’ve inputted. In addition to helping us to identify next steps in teaching, it gives us a really clear overview of the class, the school and beyond.

Try it for yourself and sign up to MERiT.