Valley Gardens is a large middle school in Whitley Bay, England. The school boasts high enrollment, often exceeding its admission numbers. Additionally, Valley Gardens is known for academic success and offers a wide range of extracurricular activities. They adopted Epraise in 2016.  

Keep reading to learn how they use Epraise to reward student behavior and motivate their community.  

The Challenge 

Like many schools in England, Valley Gardens used a basic house point system to recognize and reward students for positive behavior. Each student had a planner with a page for house points. If they behaved well, a teacher would sign their planner to award them a point. This system was difficult to manage as the information was stored in students’ planners and not easily retrievable.  

Valley Gardens began to look for an electronic rewards system that would provide more transparency into points and student behavior. They were drawn to Epraise for several reasons: 

  • Web-based and easy to access 
  • Doesn’t require much technical expertise 
  • Highly customizable 

The school also liked that Epraise offers a shop where students can redeem their points for a reward. They decided to implement Epraise as a positive reward system and “we haven’t looked back since,” says Matthew Hope, Deputy Headmaster. 

The Benefits 

Epraise quickly made a positive impact at Valley Gardens. The rewards management platform has enhanced visibility into student performance, boosted morale, and increased participation and enthusiasm for the school’s point system.  

Visibility 

“It immediately became a lot easier to see how many points everybody had. You could also see which staff members were awarding the Epraise points and which ones weren’t, making everything a lot more transparent,” says Hope.  

Epraise also allowed the school to see which classes were getting the most points — or which weren’t receiving many at all. This helped Hope and his team identify gaps and speak to the teacher to understand why their class was falling behind with points. 

Morale 

Both student and staff morale improved with the introduction of Epraise. Staff became excited about rewarding students and got creative with developing ways for students to spend their Epraise points. Students can earn points for attendance, academic behavior, and things like kindness, resilience, and respect.  

Additionally, staff were pleased with the platform’s ease of use. “Nobody’s ever said to me that they find Epraise difficult to use,” says Hope. “The Google login improvement was a big game changer because people were able to log into their school account and then use that to log into Epraise. It prevented all the issues we’ve had of forgotten passwords or usernames.”  

Participation 

For students, Epraise made points more desirable. With their previous house points system, some students were excited about points while others didn’t seem to care about them. Epraise “put [points] on the map,” says Hope. “Nobody wanted to be the kid that didn’t have enough points to do an activity with their friends.” 

Attendance 

Beyond rewards, Valley Gardens also uses Epraise to keep track of daily attendance.  

“The amount of times I’ve had issues with other software and staff members saying they can’t get onto the system, the computer crashed, was taking too long to load, or they forgot to save… It would appear that Epraise has eliminated all of those issues since we began using the attendance system,” says Hope.  

The Impact 

Since implementing Epraise, Valley Gardens has been able to motivate and support their student body in new and exciting ways. 

Student Motivation 

Prior to Epraise, students viewed points as a reward for the best and brightest students. Some students didn’t think they could get house points because they were quiet or being overlooked. “They’re much more positive about the fact that they are rewarded… everybody now receives points,” says Hope. 

Valley Gardens uses the Epraise shop to allow students to exchange points for activities. They host an activity afternoon each term where students can exchange their points to participate in special events led by staff members. “If you’re the PE teacher, you might hold an afternoon on the turf playing football,” says Hope. “Then we would set a price for those. For example, 15 Epraise points for the football activity.” 

Student Support 

Tracking points in Epraise has also enabled Valley Gardens to analyze trends and identify groups of students who might be falling behind their peers.  

“Sometimes it’s an attendance problem. We’ve enabled an automatic Epraise point if you have 100% [attendance] in a week,” says Hope. “Sometimes it’s because they’ve been overlooked in class. Epraise allows us to go back to those teachers and ask them to check in with these children and find opportunities to give them more Epraise points.” 

The Partnership 

Since implementing Epraise, Valley Gardens has adapted the platform to meet their school’s unique needs. “What I like about Epraise is that the way we’ve got this configured is probably very different to other schools,” says Hope. “It’s very adaptable to our school’s needs.” 

Additionally, continuous product innovation and reliable customer support have helped Valley Gardens maximize their use of the platform with new features and abilities. Looking ahead, the school hopes to add parents to their Epraise platform to improve engagement and provide even more student support. 

Interested in learning more about Epraise? Get in touch with our sales team for a custom demo and learn how to transform student behavior and motivation at your school.