Leverage Action Points: the few next steps that actually move a pupil

1. What a Leverage Action Point is

A LAP is not a list of everything a pupil could improve. It is a judgement about leverage - where a small amount of teacher attention buys the largest amount of learning. Each point carries four things:

• The subject it belongs to, so it can be acted on by the person who teaches it.

• The evidence behind it, quoted from what the school already recorded.

• The move - a concrete thing a teacher does, not an aspiration.

• The success check - how you would know within a lesson or two that it worked.

2. Why long target lists fail

Attention is the scarcest resource in a classroom. A long list distributes it evenly across things of wildly different value, which in practice means nothing gets sustained. Worse, long lists are usually generated once and never revisited, so they stop describing the pupil in front of you within a fortnight.

Leverage works the other way round: few points, current evidence, revisited when the evidence changes.

3. Where the evidence comes from

LAPs are derived only from what the school has already recorded - assessment marks, marked work, practice attempts, homework completion and behaviour entries.

4. How LAPs surface in Pupil Tracking

Pupil Tracking opens on a Headlines view: the pupils with the highest-leverage actions right now, filtered by year group. Each card shows the pupil, the evidence that triggered it - "below 60% in three subjects, declining in Maths" - and one headline action point.

It weighs how many subjects sit below the low threshold, the size of any recent decline, the balance of sanctions against merits, and how recent the evidence is. The card states the reason it ranked, so a head of year can agree or disagree with it.

Each pupil profile then carries the full panel: a short written analysis followed by the current action points, sitting alongside the pupil-level flags a teacher needs to see. You can read more about the leadership view in understanding your school's data.

5. Teacher-written action points

The professional judgement of the person in the room outranks any generated analysis. Staff can add their own action points against a pupil - restricted to the subjects they actually teach - edit them, and mark them addressed when the pupil has moved on.

Every change is dated and kept, so the pupil accumulates a genuine history of what was tried and what shifted.

6. From tracking into the next lesson

An action point that lives in a tracking screen changes nothing. The point of LAPs is that they travel.

In the Planning Module, picking a class pulls the current action points for the pupils on that roster. The teacher ticks the ones the lesson should address, and the generated plan contains concrete in-lesson moves for them - questions to direct, a scaffold to hand to a particular group, a check to run in the last five minutes.

7. Adaptability, not lowered expectations

LAPs are deliberately not a mechanism for giving some pupils easier work. The outcome stays ambitious and shared – one destination for the class – and the action point changes the scaffolding that gets a particular pupil there, with the intention that the scaffold fades.

8. SEND and EAL pupils

Where an action point is recorded for a pupil identified as SEND or EAL, it is logged to the SEND activity trail and appears in the SENCo view, so the picture of provision is built from ordinary classroom practice rather than from a separate paperwork exercise. See the SEND toolkit for how the assess–plan–do–review cycle is evidenced.

9. Pupil data and protection

Pupils appear under anonymised identifiers unless the school has a signed data processing agreement permitting real names, and no pupil data is used to train any model. Leaders can see the whole-school picture; teachers see the pupils they are responsible for. The access rules are the school's, not the software's - the model set out in the school and trust offer.

Common questions

What is a Leverage Action Point?

It is one of the small number of next steps for a pupil that would make the biggest difference right now, stated with the subject it belongs to, the evidence behind it, the teaching move that addresses it, and a way of checking within a lesson or two whether it worked.

How many action points should a pupil have?

Three to five. Fewer than three usually means the evidence has not been looked at properly; more than five means nothing will be sustained in a real timetable. The limit is a feature, not a shortcoming.

Where does the evidence for pupil action points come from?

Only from what the school has already recorded - assessment marks, marked work, practice attempts, homework and behaviour entries. The Educational Intelligence Layer automatically suggests LAPs from data, that teacher can choose to act on.

Can teachers write their own action points?

Yes, and they should. Staff add points for the subjects they teach, mark them addressed once a pupil has moved on, and every edit is dated so the pupil's history stays honest.

Where this fits in a joined-up school system

Leverage Action Points are one visible output of a school Educational Intelligence (EI) layer: evidence the school already holds, turned into a small number of decisions, delivered to the point where teaching actually happens. On their own they are a neat report. Inside a single system spanning planning, teaching, assessment, SEND, leadership and family engagement - the workflow described in a pedagogy-first approach to AI - they become the mechanism by which what a school knows about a pupil reaches next Tuesday's lesson.