Why this, and why now?

Across Wales, senior leadership teams are juggling three evaluation priorities at once. The National Resource: Evaluation and Improvement (NR:EI) is reshaping how schools approach their self-evaluation and school development plan. The ALN Act and Estyn's supplementary guidance have raised the bar for how schools evidence their inclusion provision. And the Chief Inspector's Annual Report has flagged attendance as a persistent, whole-sector concern.

Three priorities. Three different leads, usually. And in most schools, three separate Word documents that rarely speak to one another.

At iAbacus Wales, we've been working with headteachers, ALNCos and attendance leads across the country, and the same theme keeps coming up: the work is there, the insight is there, but the tools for pulling it all together aren't. By the time the story needs telling — to governors, to the consortium, or in an Estyn professional dialogue — it's a scramble.

That's why we've launched the iAbacus Wales Starter Edition.

What's included

The Wales Starter Edition is £395 + VAT per year. It gives three members of your SLT — typically the headteacher, the ALNCo and the attendance lead — shared access to three templates built around the frameworks you already use.

Three user accounts. Three Wales-aligned templates. One shared tool.

The three templates

NR:EI Whole-School Self-Evaluation and Development Plan

Built around the four themes of the National Resource: Evaluation and Improvement — Leadership, Learning and Teaching, Curriculum, and Well-being, equity and inclusion. The template creates a single, living hub for your School Development Plan, consolidating judgements, evidence and actions in one accessible place. Instead of having a separate self-evaluation document and a separate SDP, the two become one: your judgements against the NR:EI themes are directly linked to your improvement actions.

For a Welsh headteacher, this is the template that underpins the "Barod yn Barod" / "Ready Already" philosophy — a live, coherent story of your school's improvement journey that's always current, never filed away.

ALN Self-Evaluation and Action Plan

Designed for ALNCos and SLT, this template is aligned to Estyn's

Autumn 2024 supplementary guidance on additional learning needs. The evaluation is structured around the key inspection areas: Teaching and Learning, and Well-being, Care, Support and Guidance.

It mirrors the specific lines of enquiry Estyn inspectors use to evaluate ALN outcomes, provision and leadership. ALNCos can attach Individual Development Plans (IDPs), specialist reports and progress data directly to their judgements, creating a robust audit trail — and moving beyond description to genuine evaluation of whether provision is fostering learner independence, not just presence of support.

Attendance Review and Action Plan

Informed by the

All Wales Attendance Framework, this template helps headteachers and attendance leads diagnose barriers and build a strategic improvement plan. It uses a maturity continuum — Expected → Developing → Deepening → Transforming — across six areas: Use of Framework, Data/Targets/Evaluation, Policies and Procedures, Improving Outcomes for All, Working in Partnership, and Curriculum and Teaching.

As Owen Evans highlighted in his recent Annual Report, attendance remains a persistent issue across most schools in Wales. This template gives your SLT a structured way to diagnose your school's specific pressures — and turn that analysis into a living plan rather than another static audit.

Why the bundle works

The power isn't in the three templates sitting side by side. It's in what happens when they connect.

The iAbacus process is the same across all three: make a judgement, verify it with criteria, attach evidence, analyse what's helping and hindering, build an action plan. That shared method means your headteacher can see how the ALNCo's inclusion evaluation feeds into the whole-school NR:EI picture. Your attendance lead can see how their strategy connects to the leadership and wellbeing themes in the SDP.

A single golden thread — from strategic self-evaluation to specific improvement priorities — running through the people who actually own the work.

And each abacus exports as a polished PDF in one click, ready to share with governors, your consortium, or Estyn.

Who it's for

The Wales Starter Edition is designed for Welsh primary and secondary SLTs who want a shared, collaborative tool without committing to a whole-school roll-out on day one. Three people, three frameworks, one tool — a focused entry point into iAbacus that gets the most strategic evaluation work of the year into one place.

If your school is already looking to extend iAbacus to every member of staff — for curriculum reviews, professional growth, behaviour, wellbeing, learner progress or governance — the Unlimited Edition opens up the full template library and unlimited user accounts, with full partnership support including bespoke template design and INSET. You can move up at any time.

Ready to see it?

If you'd like a 10-minute overview, I'd be delighted to show you the platform on screen — no slides, no hard sell, just the abacuses and your questions.

Or simply reply to this post and I'll find a time that works.

Rhiannon Winters — Wales Lead, iAbacus