“The King” only managed to make contact with one small number of Scots when he flew into Prestwick in the 1950s on his return home from military service in Germany; ELVIS, on the other hand, has been seen in at least one in five Scottish schools.

Electronic Virtual Information System for Schools was developed by West Lothian Council’s education services. It enables schools to produce and maintain a range of high quality management information systems electronically, while enabling council officers to access information about schools through the authority’s network.

All of West Lothian’s nursery, primary, secondary and special schools use the program. In addition, more than 700 schools around the country have bought the software and several local authorities have acquired it to give all their schools access.

Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education and Learning and Teaching Scotland have commended the software and West Lothian has just won the top award for innovative technology from the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities.

The idea for ELVIS arose out of the growing need for schools to produce and maintain a range of key strategic documents on an annual basis. Headteachers reported that while development planning was essential and valuable, the process was time-consuming and onerous. Senior management in schools also faced major challenges in breaking down the increasing number of national and local initiatives into priorities, targets, outcomes and performance indicators. So West Lothian’s education service, working with other agencies including Northern College in Aberdeen, set out to create a resource to support the work of school management and education officers.

ELVIS was developed over a year and during the 2000-01 session 116 teachers undertook staff development courses organised by the education service to implement the system in their schools. St Margaret’s Academy in Livingston went a stage further. An education officer who had been part of the ELVIS development team filled a short-term vacancy in the school management team.

Tony Gavin, the headteacher at St Margaret’s, says he was prompted to use the software because of the need to produce an annual Standards and Quality Report with consistency in development plans across departments. “It ensured that all departmental plans were consistent with school and local priorities and guaranteed that the plans were addressing the main issues the school had identified. Without ELVIS it would have been difficult to get this consistency.”

Staff found it very beneficial that they could select from a menu of action points and related performance indicators, he says. “It’s easier to make choices than to start doing it all yourself.”

The school has Phoenix, the management information system used by most Scottish authorities, but it is limited in what it can do for development planning and reviewing, says Mr Gavin. ELVIS helps with self-evaluation, based on HMI statements of performance, and is particularly useful for working on the school profile.

“Once the profile is on the system, it’s very easy to change it. We had HMI visit us for one subject. It took me half an hour at most to prepare the data they required,” says Mr Gavin.

“Also, once all information is held centrally, I would be able to see what other schools are doing.”

Jan Lumsden, headteacher of Kirkhill Primary in Broxburn, says that teachers had been spending so much time putting development plans together and thinking about the evaluative language that would allow them to assess whether targets had been reached. “ELVIS has freed up time to do the business of teaching and at the same time has provided us with a bank of identifiable and measurable targets which are in line with national guidelines and consistent with other schools in the authority.”

For more on ELVIS, contact Frank Monaghan, West Lothian education services, tel 01506 776136