When you become an academic manager, you’re expected to pay close attention to a load of numbers, which are supposed to tell you how well the school is doing. For example:

• Demo sign ups

• New students

• Drop-out students

• Referral students

• Re-signing students

Academic quality is tough to measure directly. So tough, in fact, that you have to measure the effect it has on related stuff (like retention). In a previous article about using data, I talked about three things to measure — dropout students, student retention and student referrals.

Today I’d like to suggest two new metrics that have all this information embedded into them and are a great way to measure your school's health.

For students: total average completed course time at the school.

For teachers: total average completed contract length.

Both of these are measured in months. You can calculate these in the same way, for example:

A teacher is a third of the way through his third-year contract. He has completed 2 x 12-month contracts, so his completed contract length is 24 months.

Supposing he negotiates to leave his contract because of a sudden family emergency. He has now completed 24 months + 4 months = 28 months.

This principle is the same for students. If a student has paid for 5 x 5-month courses, she has completed 25 months (even if there is a gap between courses).

Once you find the average of all your students and teachers, you can keep an eye on these long-term figures and work on improving them.

See you again in two weeks.

Whenever you're ready, there are three ways I can help you:

1. Learn how to plan better, faster and stress-free with my book Lesson Planning for Language Teachers (90 ratings, 4.5⭐ on Amazon).

2. Develop calm students, a relaxed mind and a classroom full of learning with my book Essential Classroom Management (16 ratings, 4.5⭐ on Amazon).

3. Improve your teaching in five minutes daily with my Reflective Teaching Practice Journal (4 ratings, 4.5⭐ on Amazon).