BenchMark – a way to measure the things we’re held to account for

There’s a child in every school who never signs up for anything.

They’re not difficult. They’re not disengaged. They do their work, they stay under the radar, they go home. And somewhere along the line, probably around Year 8, they stopped expecting school to be interested in them beyond their attendance percentage and their last set of scores.

The thing they’d have signed up for never appeared on the list. Or it was there last year and isn’t this year. Or it clashed with the intervention group someone decided they needed. Or nobody asked.

And so they pass through. Year 7, Year 8, Year 9, Year 10, Year 11. Five years of registers they never appeared on. Five years of clubs they never joined. Five years of a school that never noticed. Not because it didn’t care, but because it had no way of noticing.

We measure the things we’re held to account for. Progress. Attendance. We are not, in any formal sense, held to account for whether the enrichment offer is genuinely broad, genuinely fair, or genuinely reaching the children who need it most. So the quiet ones slip through. Not because anyone is neglectful. Because the things we treasure most in schools, the clubs, the trips, the teams, the rehearsals, are the things we measure least.

Harry French built BenchMark because he doesn’t think that’s good enough.

It’s free. Eight benchmarks, aligned to the five DfE categories. It takes a senior team about twenty five minutes on a first pass. Built by Harry – an existing experienced school Principal. You answer some honest questions about your offer, and it shows you where you stand, and where you don’t.

The picture isn’t always comfortable. There are gaps you already know about, and then there are gaps it shows you that you didn’t. The year group that has sport and nothing else. The entitlement that looks broad on paper and turns out to be three clubs and a wet Thursday. The child who isn’t signing up for anything, because the thing they’d have signed up for was never there.

That’s what it’s for. Not to judge your school. To show you what you can’t quite see from inside it.

The value isn’t the score. It’s the deputy who reads the results and says, “I didn’t know that.” It’s the conversation that comes next. It’s the child who finally gets their name on a register.

BenchMark is at https://rounded.education. It’s free, and it takes less than half an hour.

And it might just show you the child you’ve been missing.