Hello and welcome to this Power BI Further Skills course.

This is a follow-on course from my earlier Power Bi Skills course. So if you’ve just finished this previous course you should find that this course picks up seamlessly where we left off.

But don’t worry if you haven’t completed the Power BI Skills course, so long as you have had some experience using Power BI in your school this course should be quite straightforward.

Although this course uses SIMS in many examples, you will still get lots of benefit from this course if your schools uses one of the many alternatives to SIMS that now exist. Indeed, I’ll try to include information for Bromcom and Arbor users as we go along.

By the end of this course I want you to be confident in creating visualizations to analyse assessments, attendance and pupil demographics, as well as behaviour and achievements.

To achieve this we need to look at two key areas of Power BI: the DAX language and the power query editor.

So first I will teach you the basics of measures and calculated columns using DAX, the programming language at the heart of Power BI.

Then we’ll look in detail at the power query editor and talk about cleaning and shaping data before we bring it in to Power BI and create a data model.

These two areas will set us up to look at ways to analyse what I think are the key areas for data analysis in our schools:

• pupil demographics,
• attendance marks,
• assessment (including exam results) and
• behaviour data.

In attendance we will create a date table that allows us to look at attendance patterns in detail over days, weeks, terms and academic years.

In assessment, We will extract termly assessment data from SIMS and show you how to compare target with actual grades and how to analyse 9-1 grades.

In behaviour, we will look at ways of analysing pupil behaviour (positive and negative) using the new artificial intelligence tools in Power BI

Please use the comments section to add your questions (so that other people can benefit from your questions. If you are stuck, feel free to email [email protected]

At the end of each section I plan to iclude a copy of my PBIX file, and any other files that I use (data files, excel spreadsheets and so on) - so look out for those.

I hope you enjoy the course!

David.