We now do Destinations Tracking!

Alex Kelly, Director at Unifrog, shares news of our Destinations tool.

For the last two years we’ve been working on a destinations tracking tool. It’s by far the biggest and most exciting thing we’ve ever done at Unifrog. Last week we officially launched it at the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) Annual Conference.

Get in touch with us now if you would like a first look at the tool and to hear more.

First some background: I started teaching in 2005. After a few years I felt that largely due to the pressures of league tables, schools had developed an unhealthy obsession with supporting students’ to achieve impressive academic grades over all else. Like many of my colleagues I thought that the education system should have been putting more emphasis on where students actually ended up after school.

It was out of this concern that Unifrog was born - my wife, Coralie, and I started Unifrog in 2013 to help students choose their best next step for them after school.

But now we want to take things further. We have spent the last two years designing the new Destinations tool because we want to help put students’ destinations at the heart of how schools assess their own performance. Crucially, our belief is that destinations data should not become another league table metric, instead it should be harnessed for the benefit of students and teachers.

There are four key ways in which our new Destinations tool could help you, your students and your school:
 

1.     It makes collecting destinations data from students quicker and easier 

The first challenge with destinations information is that it’s difficult to collect. We’ve spent most of our development time making students’ intentions (where they think they want to go), and also their destinations (where they actually go) blissfully easy for you to record. Students and teachers can enter the necessary information in a few seconds in a lovely intuitive interface. They can come back and update the information at any time.
 

2.     It evaluates each student’s destination to give you usable insights

The second difficulty with destinations data is knowing whether a particular destination is ‘good’ for a particular student. This is always going to be subjective, but to give schools immediate insight we’ve created a Destinations Value Add score to tell you whether their destination is impressive compared to all the other students with the same results and destination.

To make things even more useful, we have integrated students’ destinations information with their characteristics (Gender, Nationality, English as an Additional Language, etc), and built a powerful dashboard which allows you to do analysis on your own destinations data. The aim is for the Dashboard to turn your destinations data into granular, actionable analysis.
 

3.     It builds an unparalleled database of the actual entry requirements at all universities, all over in the world 

The tool records students’ actual qualifications, subjects and grades at the point of them leaving high school, and the exact university and programme they are entering, wherever it is in the world. This means that when your students use Unifrog to compare university programmes around the world - in the USA or Norway, for example - they can see the academic profiles of students who have successfully progressed into those programmes in previous years. Unifrog therefore gives your students an unrivalled insight into their chances of getting in to programmes all over the world.
 

4.     It builds a detailed alumni database

The tool securely stores your alumni’s contact details, and you can continue to update students’ destinations after they have left you. The updating takes seconds, can be done on a mobile, and the tool records who did the updating and when. The alumni database is also easily searchable so you can quickly contact exactly the type of ex-students you want to get in touch with.

The new Destinations tool is ready. We know it will save you time, give you incredible insights, and build a strong alumni database.  If you are interested in being one of our pioneering schools, please get in touch now!