Motional Partner Spotlight
This February, we are giving the spotlight to our partners at Motional! Motional is a suite of online tools to help schools with emotional health and well-being. We had a chat with Founder, Neil Gilmour, to understand more about their product and their experience using Xporter.
“Our core tool allows staff to quickly answer questions about behaviour and skills they see in a pupil, and then get a whole-brain picture of that pupil’s emotional health,” Neil explains. “They’ll also get relational strategies and tips for improving the pupil’s access to learning by best supporting the emotional systems that are most important for that pupil at that time. Of course, this changes over time and our charts make it really obvious when things have been going well, and also where a pupil may need some extra support. These strategies are things that can be done at the same time as whatever the member of staff would normally be doing with that pupil, be that in class, an intervention, lunchtime or whenever – it doesn’t take any extra time!
“All of this can be done for groups as well – a termly assessment for each registration group not only gives teaching and support staff all of the above for their pupils, but also gives a great whole school overview, eg ‘boys aged 7/8 with ADHD aren’t improving as much as the rest of the school,’ or for a MAT it could be that ‘school A’s KS4 girls are suddenly improving faster after a recent peer education program, can we replicate that across the rest of the MAT?’ And so on…
“We started back in 2017 and we’re now used by around 14,000 staff in 1400 teams.” Neil continues. “We only just started thinking about sales or marketing this year – everything so far has been through word of mouth. That makes us very proud, and also reassures us that our users (affectionately known as ‘Motioneers’) are as enthusiastic about Motional as we are…
“As you can imagine, with over 1000 teams using Motional, we have a lot of pupils to add and remove every year. We built a bulk import tool very early on to make this much quicker for us, but in order to save our users even more time we’re now looking at ways to speed up the process on their end. A tool like Xporter will turn it from ‘who is it again that can run exports from our MIS? Oh, they’re on holiday…’ and ‘sorry James, could you add the date of birth to the file?’ to ‘sure, I’ll approve that request in Xporter now.’ We’re excited by the range of MIS systems that Xporter integrates with – especially that they cover Scotland!
“The API is really clean and well-documented – I doubt we’ll need any tech support from Xporter. I’m really confident that they’ve thought about data security and privacy as much as I do. The other tools within the Community Brands group are an interesting opportunity for further integrations as well…”
We look forward to any future developments in our partnership with Motional. Find out more about Xporter and become a partner today!
