There are certain things that tell you the school year is properly underway.
The traffic is back. The school run is chaos again. The staffroom is full. The photocopier may already be causing problems.
And somewhere between getting new students settled, figuring out timetables and remembering which room you’re teaching in, there is usually the small matter of getting everyone back up to speed with the systems your school actually relies on.
For schools using the Athena Tracker, September can be a particularly useful time to take stock. New teachers arrive. New post holders take on responsibilities. Staff move into different roles. And even the people who have been using the Athena Tracker for years may not be getting everything they can from it.
That is where the Athena Tracker Workshops come in.
A Fresh Start for the School Year
Athena Tracker is designed to give schools a clearer picture of student performance and, importantly, individual student potential.
Used across secondary schools in Ireland, the platform uses a statistical model built from millions of Irish exam results to help schools identify where students may need additional support, set realistic targets and keep track of progress.
But having access to a system and actually making the most of it are two different things. So while “staff training” might not sound like the most exciting way to spend an autumn day, there is a good reason schools keep coming back to it.
Good training is supposed to make the rest of the year easier.
It’s Not Just About Learning Where the Buttons Are
One of the biggest mistakes schools can make with any piece of software is treating training as a one-off exercise.
Someone shows you how the system works. You nod along. You use it a few times. Then three months later, someone asks a question and you realise you had completely forgotten that feature existed.
That is particularly relevant in a busy school environment, where staff are juggling teaching, meetings, assessments, pastoral responsibilities and approximately 400 other things at any given time.
The Athena Tracker Workshops are designed for exactly this.
The sessions are in-person training days where staff from different schools come together to work through the software, ask questions and discuss how it is being used in practice. Workshops are available at Beginner, Mixed and Experienced levels, so schools can choose the session that best fits where their staff are at.
And perhaps the most useful part is that you are not sitting in a room being talked at for five hours.
The workshops include a detailed run-through of the software alongside an interactive roundtable discussion. That means there is room to ask the awkward questions, revisit things you have forgotten and talk through how other schools are approaching academic tracking.
Why Learning From Other Schools Matters
There is something particularly useful about hearing how another school is using a system.
A feature that seems fairly ordinary to one person can become a complete game-changer for someone else.
A school might have developed a process for academic monitoring that another school has never considered. A post holder might have found a simple way of getting staff to engage with the tracker. A year head might have figured out how to turn the data into more productive conversations with students.
These are the things you do not necessarily pick up from a user guide.
The September Advantage
There is also something to be said for doing this at the start of the school year rather than waiting until everyone is already flat out.
September gives schools a natural opportunity to reset.
New staff can get comfortable with the platform. Existing users can refresh their knowledge. Academic tracking post holders can sharpen their approach before the year really gets moving. And school leaders can look at how Athena Tracker fits into their wider plans for student support and school improvement.
So, Who Should Attend?
The obvious answer is anyone who uses the Athena Tracker.
But there is a strong case for thinking beyond the usual suspects.
A Beginner Workshop is aimed at new users, including new post holders or members of an academic tracking team. Mixed Workshops are particularly useful for schools bringing several staff members with different levels of experience, while Experienced Workshops are designed for established users who want to deepen their knowledge and explore best practice.
That makes the workshops useful at different stages of the school year and for different people within the school.
It could be the newly appointed academic monitor.
It could be a teacher who has been using the Athena Tracker but knows there are features they are not using.
It could be a senior leader who wants a better understanding of how academic tracking can support the wider school.
Or it could simply be a group of colleagues who want to make sure they are all approaching the system in the same way.
More Than a Day Out of School
One of the easiest things to underestimate is the value of taking people out of the normal school environment for a few hours.
An in-person workshop gives staff something that is difficult to recreate between classes, meetings and emails: time to actually focus.
Time to hear how another school is handling the same issue. And, perhaps most importantly, time to think about how you want to use the Athena Tracker for the year ahead.
With the first listed 2026/27 workshop taking place in Tallaght on 17 September, the back-to-school reset is already on the calendar.
So before the school year gets completely away from you, it might be worth giving your staff a refresher.
Find out more about the Athena Tracker workshops and where they are scheduled here.
