A little over a year ago I joined Compass and was immediately given two things: a limited brief, and a lot of freedom. Pulse is the end result.

Given my background as a science teacher, I get it: teachers are time-poor. Introducing any new technology into schools without addressing this - or even making it worse, creating more work - is a non-starter. On the other hand, my background also means that my career has always been focused on one thing: improving the lives of students. Pulse combines the practical consideration and the principle: easy-to-use technology for teachers to drive amazing outcomes for students - the latter might not see Pulse, but ultimately that is who it’s for.

So what does it do? As the tagline says, Pulse allows teachers and school administrators to get to the heart of the matter - at least as far as attendance, wellbeing and academic assessment is concerned.

This isn’t what Pulse was always going to be. Nothing was set in stone. But speaking to schools, we noticed a number of key trends in the sector that were impossible to ignore, among them the turn to the School-wide positive behaviour support (SWPBS) framework, something we saw a real opportunity to begin reinforcing.

Key to SWPBS are the big five data reports, these are average referrals per day and per month; referrals by problem behavior; referrals by location; referrals by student; and referrals by time. Reporting on all of these things has always been possible within Compass through Chronicle, just not especially easy - unless you had a data wiz to hand. Pulse changes that.

But Pulse is about more than SWPBS. It’s about ensuring that data is at teacher’s fingertips, so everyone who needs to see it can see it; that it is not out of date and messy, but timely and clear. Rather than there being one person in your school who crunches the numbers, staff can see exactly what they need to regarding the students in their class.

It’s been a long journey building Pulse, but it’s a product we are all really proud of.

Find out more about Pulse.