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A teacher herself, Rachel came up with the original idea for ReportBox. Here is her story:

When I was at school

I was one of those children who waited eagerly for my school report to be handed out at the end of the year. I loved hearing my teacher's reflections on what I had achieved throughout the year.

To me, my reports were my reward for working hard, like a well deserved reference.

How to write reports, the old way

In the third term of my NQT year I knew the time was approaching when I would get to write my first reports for the children in my class. Strangely, although I was working hard and had no free time, I was actually looking forward to writing my reports.

I met with my school mentor who gave me a pack of information and gave me some direction as to how I should undertake the massive task that lay before me.

I started by writing three comments for a male for each subject. One for a "more able", "average" and" less able" pupil. Next, I created a large table with three columns for each level and a row for each subject. Then I duplicated the entire table and reproduced each comment for a female child.

Having created a comment bank I then opened up each child's report as a separate document. Finally I went through the endless process of copying and pasting the appropriate comment into each box on each document.

Documents everywhere

I ended up shuffling between 30 different documents trying to keep on top of who needed what comment.

The most difficult part of the process was checking all of my reports. It took ages to open each document in turn and check for errors.

Spelling mistakes and pronouns

Unfortunately despite my best efforts my reports were checked by the senior management team and returned with lots of errors such as spelling mistakes and incorrect pronouns. Worse still these errors had been repeated over and over again because of the copying and pasting.

Nondescript chaos

By the end of the process I was left with a pile of reports that had taken me hours to produce and that I felt did not do my children justice.

Every single one of my children was unique with their own set of talents and struggles but yet I felt that my reports sounded strangely familiar to each other. In the midst of my copying and pasting chaos my reports had become variations of the same nondescript document.

A better way?

During a late night report writing session I expressed my discontent to Stuart, my husband. Stuart runs a web development agency and saw a way to make my life easier.

He created a system that allowed me to insert my comments directly into each child's report and personalize each comment to make my reports reflect each child. It was all done online with no more document shuffling or copy and pasting!

Over the last couple of years the system has matured and developed. It now includes pronoun correction, spell checking and the ability to check or print my reports at the click of a button. I have used ReportBox for two years now and I am always impressed by how much time I save.

The best bit is that my reports reflect the hard work completed by my children and they look and sound every bit like the reports I waited so eagerly for when I was young.