How Meridian Trust uses Aspire Pupil Tracking to see progress across 39 schools
By FFT Education
Meridian Trust is a multi-academy trust of 39 schools, spanning all-through, primary, secondary and special settings, all of which use FFT Aspire in some form. The trust has used FFT since Aspire launched, and relied on FFT dashboards before that. Here’s how it uses Aspire Pupil Tracking to get a clearer, fairer read on progress across a large and varied group of schools.
Why Meridian chose Aspire Pupil Tracking
The trust wanted to benchmark its own progress, attainment and prediction quality against a large national sample, so it could pinpoint where to improve and spot promising practice to share across its schools.
“Aspire Pupil Tracking has given us a clear overview of progress against nationally benchmarked data, offering a much more nuanced understanding of subject level performance than purely looking at attainment.”
— Andy Daly, Executive Principal
How the trust uses it
Meridian uses Aspire reports to identify pupils and groups falling behind estimates and national benchmarks, which lets it assign interventions and direct cross-trust support to where it’s needed most. Tracking against estimates has also given a consistent, early view of progress for current Year 11 pupils — an area where trusts often struggle to get clarity. The next step is setting targets directly in Aspire once bulk upload is available.
Training runs as an ongoing process: self-evaluation tools and short videos build use among senior and middle leaders, then cascade through school leaders and curriculum teams across the trust’s networks. Staff also attend FFT briefings on national results, assessment and policy, and draw on FFT Education Datalab to benchmark trust-level data against emerging trends.
The impact
Staff now review progress and attainment against a national picture at subject level, and can test whether progress and prediction accuracy are as strong as they could be. That makes it easier to target support precisely — for subject teams and individual pupils alike — from trust level down to individual departments.
The trust points to four reasons it recommends Aspire Pupil Tracking: better visibility of progress where DfE data falls short, national benchmarks for a fairer evaluation of progress, simple dashboards, and support for data-informed decisions across the trust.
Find out more – read the full Meridian Trust case study or learn more about Aspire Pupil Tracking.