Leadership Analytics: KPIs, Staff Utilisation, and Wellbeing Trends for School Leaders

The Visibility Gap

School leaders are responsible for student wellbeing outcomes but often have limited visibility into the support work happening across their school. The wellbeing team keeps detailed case records, but sharing those records with leadership raises confidentiality concerns. The result is a gap: leadership knows support is being provided but cannot answer basic operational questions.

How many referrals came in this term? How quickly are they being triaged? Which year levels generate the most concerns? Are any staff members carrying disproportionate caseloads? What proportion of referrals reach resolution?

These are operational questions, not case questions. They can be answered with numbers that do not expose individual student details. The leadership briefing on the Reports page is built to answer them.

What the Dashboard Shows

Key Performance Indicators

The briefing opens with headline figures for the period you select:

• Total referrals in the period
• Active referrals — currently open, and the number of students they cover
• Closed referrals — resolved in the period
• Urgent referrals still open — the high-priority work that has not yet closed
• Average days to triage — how long referrals wait before being reviewed
• Average days to allocation — how long before a staff member is assigned
• Average days to close — the full lifecycle from referral to resolution
• Total unique students referred
• Repeat referrals — students referred more than once, and the repeat rate as a percentage

These figures give leadership a snapshot of demand, capacity and throughput without any case detail.

Staff Utilisation

The Reports page shows each staff member's caseload. This helps leadership identify:

• Staff members approaching capacity
• Uneven distribution of work across the team
• Whether additional staffing or reallocation is needed

It is also useful day to day: when a new referral is allocated, Descant suggests a staff member based on the support area, the student's year level and who has the lowest caseload, and the person allocating confirms or chooses someone else. The caseload view shows leaders whether that balance is holding.

Referral Patterns

The briefing breaks referrals down by:

• Area of support — wellbeing, learning, behaviour, attendance and the other areas recorded on each referral
• Year level — which year levels are generating the most support needs
• Support tier — the MTSS tier distribution (Tier 1 universal, Tier 2 targeted, Tier 3 intensive), showing the balance of support intensity across the school

Together these show where demand is concentrated and how intensive it is — whether a spike in one year level is mostly early, light-touch support or a cluster of Tier 3 students.

Monthly Trends

A trend view showing referrals created versus referrals closed by month. This reveals whether the support team is keeping pace with demand, whether referral volumes spike at certain times of year (start of term, exam periods, transition points), and whether the closure rate is tracking positively.

Closure Outcomes

How referrals end, grouped by the outcome rating recorded when each one was closed — for example improved, no change or deteriorated. Every referral in Descant closes with a reason and an outcome rating, so this view helps leadership understand not just how many referrals close, but how they close.

Early Warning and Outstanding Actions

Alongside the briefing, the Reports page has two working lists for the support team:

• Early-warning list — students the team may need to look at sooner, such as those with unresolved check-in flags, several low-mood check-ins in recent weeks, or a repeat episode of support. Unlike the briefing, this list names students, because its purpose is for the team to act.
• Outstanding actions — meeting actions and family follow-ups that are still open, with their owner and due date, so follow-up does not slip between meetings. Line managers can also choose a weekly email summary of these actions, which shows counts only.

Because these lists name students, access to the Reports page should be given to people who are part of the support service or responsible for it.

PDF Export and Other Downloads: CSV, Spreadsheet and Meeting Brief

The briefing downloads in four formats:

• PDF — for board reports and accreditation evidence
• CSV — for your own analysis or sector-level reporting
• Spreadsheet — for staffing proposals and planning
• Meeting brief — a short summary for leadership and support team meetings

Every download is de-identified. Student names are left out, counts are rounded, and small numbers are suppressed so that a count small enough to point to an individual student does not appear. Downloading needs the line-manager role, so the people producing reports for governance are the people accountable for the service.

Typical uses include:

• Board reports — showing the volume and nature of student support activity to school governance
• Accreditation evidence — showing structured, data-informed wellbeing support for registration and review bodies
• Departmental submissions — providing de-identified figures for sector-level reporting
• Staffing proposals — supporting requests for additional wellbeing positions with workload data

What Leadership Does Not See in the Briefing

The briefing is deliberately designed to provide operational oversight without case access:

• No student names in the briefing or its downloads
• No case note content — narrative records remain with the support team
• Small numbers suppressed in downloads, so counts cannot identify a student

The early-warning list and outstanding actions on the same page do name students, as described above. Leaders who need the numbers but not the names can work from the downloaded briefing.

This separation is intentional. Leadership needs to understand demand, capacity and outcomes. They do not need — and should not routinely access — the detail of individual student support.

Using the Data

Staffing Decisions

When the caseload view shows one counsellor carrying 25 active referrals while another carries 8, that is an allocation conversation. When Tier 3 intensive referrals make up 40% of the total, that may indicate a need for more targeted Tier 2 interventions to prevent escalation.

Environmental Interventions

When a specific year level consistently generates high referral volumes, the response may not be individual student support — it may be a cohort-level intervention. The data surfaces the pattern; the professionals decide the response.

Demonstrating Impact

Schools investing in wellbeing staffing need to demonstrate impact. Declining average response times, improving closure rates, and balanced caseload distribution are all measurable indicators that the investment is working. The de-identified downloads make these figures shareable with the audiences that matter.

Getting Started

The Reports page is available to staff whose role gives them access to the caseload. Downloading the briefing needs the line-manager role. Open Reports and choose a date range to focus on a specific term, semester or year.

Visit For Schools to learn more, or get in touch for a walkthrough.

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The leadership briefing is derived from referral and support activity. It does not include case note content, and its downloads do not include student names. The early-warning list on the Reports page names students for the support team. All decisions about students remain the responsibility of the professionals involved.

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