Robert Napier Academy

"Overall my favourite aspect of the platform is that it centralises a previously disparate process. I can log in and see what any student is doing at any moment, and message them in real time, and I can do the same with staff."

Rebecca Brattle, Head of Sixth Form

 

Competencies

"We love the competencies tool. It helps students recognise the achievements they should be proud of, records concrete examples of them and makes them accessible when writing their Personal Statements and job applications. We’ve found that filling in their competencies provides students with a stronger understanding of what universities and employers are looking for.

Students hate writing about themselves - they think it's a little arrogant to try and sell themselves - but they find it much easier when this process is broken down into chunks.

We’ve embraced the competencies tool so much that we’ve created our own ‘Leadership and Engagement Award’ matched against completing the tool."

 

Best practice

"Our students and staff frequently use the bullet-point guidelines and examples that Unifrog provides on the Personal Statement and References tools. We’ve always done comprehensive training on these two aspects of the university application process, but having best practice examples available to you exactly when you need them is very handy.

One concrete example of the impact of this guidance is that teachers writing Subject References now make better use of specific examples of things that students have done in their class."

 

Management

"Overall my favourite aspect of the platform is that it centralises a previously disparate process. I can log in and see what any student is doing at any moment, and message them in real time, and I can do the same with staff.

Taking Personal Statements as an example: previously students would send drafts to different teachers and then lose track of the most current version. Now there is one place where every Personal Statement is written, every version of each Personal Statement is saved so it’s impossible for good quality work to be lost, and we always know what the most up to date version of each statement is.

Similarly with References, Unifrog has made it much easier to monitor the creation of references because they are all written in one place, and it’s also easier to ensure the references are high calibre because I can do things like see at the click of a button which references are under the recommended minimum character count.

Unifrog helps me to be far more on top of a process that is at times very complex and confusing. It has given me so much more time!"