Everything your school needs to get from first login to first insight, aligned with how Learning Lens works today.

What is Learning Lens?

Learning Lens turns agreed classroom visits into structured evidence and school-level analytics. Observers tap a research-grounded taxonomy of teacher practices (with optional qualifiers) and pupil response indicators in real time. Evidence aggregates across teachers, departments, and time, with summaries framed in the evaluative language of your school’s inspection framework.

It is designed for developmental use: descriptive evidence and patterns, not one-off scores or grades on a lesson.

What makes it different

• Shared professional language — Practices are organised into eleven categories, each linked to named research in Info Mode (toggle in the capture toolbar).
• Qualifier depth — Many practices expand to show descriptive sub-tags so you capture what kind of practice you saw, not only that it appeared.
• Framework-aware analytics — Inspection-style quantifiers in summaries are derived from your visit data.
• Works offline — If the network drops mid-lesson, learning visits are held on your device and upload automatically when you are back online (see Offline capture).

Devices and browser

Use a laptop or iPad with an up-to-date browser (Chrome, Edge, Safari, or Firefox). Recording a learning visit needs a screen at least the size of a small tablet — on a phone you will see a message asking you to switch to a larger device, and your draft is kept safe until you do.

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Creating your account

Open mylearninglens.app and sign in or sign up using:

• Email and password — You may be asked to confirm your email address before you can join a school; the app tells you if that step is needed.
• Google or Microsoft — Usually avoids the separate email-confirmation step that applies to some email/password accounts.

There is no separate “invitation link” that bypasses join setup: colleagues who already have a school in the system join with a join code (see below).

Password reset

On the login screen, expand Forgot password? to send a reset link to your email, then follow that link to choose a new password.

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First-time school setup

The demo school (no setup needed)

Want to look around before your school is on Learning Lens? From the marketing site choose Explore the demo school, or pick it on the setup screen after you sign in. You'll browse Meadowbank High School (demo) — a worked example school already populated with observations — in read-only mode. Nothing to set up, and nothing you do there affects a real school.

Setting up a new school

Schools are provisioned by Learning Lens, not self-serve. When your school is onboarded you're issued a one-time setup code. On the setup screen choose Set up a new school and enter:

• Setup code — Issued when your school is onboarded. No code yet? Talk to us to get started.
• School name
• Your display name (shown as observer name by default)
• School type — Drives which stage options appear on learning visits (e.g. Scottish vs English stage labels)

You are created as the school's first Admin. The framework used for analytics and summaries is set when your school is provisioned; there is no framework choice at setup. Preset lenses and walkthrough question templates are set up for you in the background where possible.

Joining an existing school

Choose Join an existing school, enter the join code your admin shared, then your display name, role, and department where the form requires it.

Schools can have two join codes (Staff and Leadership) with different maximum roles:

• Staff code — Teacher and Middle Leader roles.
• Leadership code — Also allows the SLT role.

Admin is never assignable via a join code; only an existing admin can promote someone to admin in Staff management.

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Installing on your device (optional)

For quick access and reliable offline behaviour, install the app to your home screen:

• iPad (Safari): Share → Add to Home Screen.
• Chrome / Edge: Use the install icon in the address bar, or the browser’s “Install app” option.

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Roles and what people see

There are four roles: Teacher, Middle Leader, SLT, and Admin.

Lenses and Walkthroughs (question bank) in the main navigation are available to Admin and SLT only. Middle leaders still select an existing lens when starting a visit if the school has created lenses.

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Adding colleagues

Learning Lens does not email magic links to auto-attach users. The usual pattern is:

1. Import or maintain your staff list on the Staff page — including optional spreadsheet (CSV) import, so teachers appear in autocomplete and visits are attributed to the right person.
2. Share join codes from the same page. Copy the Staff and/or Leadership code so colleagues can complete Join a school after they sign up.

Colleagues you have added but who have not yet signed in may appear in the staff list as invited, until they sign in and claim their place.

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Taxonomy snapshot

Observers record teacher practices from a fixed taxonomy (eleven categories, dozens of practices). Many practices have qualifiers — short descriptive tags. Pupil response indicators are logged from their own row of buttons during capture, so learner evidence sits alongside teacher practice.

Toggle Info Mode in the capture toolbar to show ? next to practices; open a practice to see description, research references, and “look for” prompts.

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Observation lenses

Who configures: Admin or SLT, under Lenses in the main navigation. Each lens has a name, a description, a set of selected practices, and an active/inactive setting.

What happens on a visit:

1. Setup — Under “Observation Lens”, pick Full Taxonomy or a named lens.
2. Briefing — If a lens is selected, a full-screen briefing card opens first: lens title and description, a “What to look for” list from the chosen practices, and optional “You might see” examples.
3. Capture — Focus practices are visually emphasised; other categories can stay collapsed until you expand them. A reminder bar, which you can dismiss, may appear after the early phase if you have not yet logged any focus practice. Short on-screen messages mark the move from one lesson phase to the next. If nothing is logged for a while, the practice grid dims slightly and you may see a brief prompt to record pupil responses.

A lens does not filter analytics away from other practices; it steers attention during capture.

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Learning visits (full taxonomy)

Starting a visit

From the dashboard use New Visit, or + New Visit in the header.

Setup form order and fields:

1. Observer — Defaults to your display name; editable.
2. Teacher — Autocomplete from school staff (teachers and middle leaders on the roster).
3. Department and Stage — Department list is fixed (e.g. English, Mathematics, …); stages depend on school type.
4. Subject — Free text.
5. Visit length — Optional; if set, lesson phases (early / mid / late) are worked out as proportions of that length. If you leave it blank, phases fall back to fixed timings: early for the first 5 minutes, mid from 5 to 12 minutes, and late from 12 minutes onwards.
6. Teacher awareness — Checkbox confirming the visit is agreed and developmental.
7. Observation lens — Pills: Full Taxonomy or any active school lens, with the lens description shown when selected.

Use Start Visit. With a lens, you pass through briefing first; otherwise capture begins after Start Visit (or Start Observation from the briefing card).

Logging evidence

• First tap on a practice that has qualifiers expands the qualifier row.
• Tap a qualifier to log practice + qualifier + timestamp + phase.
• Second tap on the same practice while the row is expanded logs the practice without a qualifier (equivalent to the Just … skip control).
• Practices without qualifiers log on a single tap.
• Undo (↩) removes the last event; tap an entry in the history row to remove that specific event.

The history row shows the last eight events with time, label, optional qualifier, and category colour.

Pupil response uses the lower row of buttons; some responses open a small pop-up for an extra qualifier.

Finish Visit runs a short review flow (including narrative fields your school uses), then saves the visit.

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Quick walkthroughs (corridor scan)

Quick Walkthrough (on the dashboard, and in the menu on smaller screens) is not the full practice grid. It is built around one school-defined question at a time with a set of response options (e.g. “Seen clearly / Partially seen / Not seen”).

Before the first walkthrough: an Admin or SLT should open Walkthroughs in the main navigation and make sure active questions exist. If none exist, the capture screen explains that setup is required.

Flow:

1. Choose a question card and, optionally, an observation lens from the dropdown (the lens is recorded alongside the run where configured).
2. Start Walkthrough.
3. For each room: enter a room label (teacher name or room number; staff names autocomplete), then tap one response button.
4. A short recent history (last three rooms) appears for quick checking.
5. Finish Walkthrough saves the session; a results view supports narrative copy-out and PDF export of that run.

If a walkthrough was captured while you were offline, come back online so it uploads.

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Offline capture

• Learning visits — Your draft is saved on the device as you go, so you can pick it up again after an accidental refresh. Complete and save each visit before starting another where possible.
• Quick walkthroughs — Rooms are held in the browser as you go and saved when you finish the walkthrough. Finish the walkthrough before closing the tab so the session is written away.

Connection status appears as a bar across the top of the page: when you are offline, when visits are waiting to upload, while they are uploading, or if an upload fails (with a “Sync now” button when you are back online). The header also shows a small offline icon when your device has no network.

If visits are still waiting to upload, wait until the status bar shows they are done before closing the app or navigating away.

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Analytics tabs

For Admin and SLT, the analytics page includes these tabs (the framework tab label reflects your school's framework):

1. Practice Profile — Category and practice frequency views.
2. Departments — Department comparisons, including radar-style fingerprint charts.
3. Stages — Stage / year-group lens on the same visit set.
4. Patterns — Co-occurrence and phase-related views.
5. Engagement — Aggregated pupil-response indicators.
6. Trends — Change over time.
7. Teachers — Per-teacher profiles for developmental dialogue.
8. Observers — Calibration-style views comparing observers and how often each records particular categories, built from the visits you can see.
9. Framework — Framework-aligned prose written automatically from your data.
10. Walkthroughs — Analytics for walkthrough sessions alongside learning visits.

Middle leaders see the same set except the whole-school Departments tab.

Teachers see only the Teachers tab, covering their own visits.

Date filters and (where shown) lens filters apply across tabs consistently.

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Exports (where to click)

Exports contain only data your role can already see.

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Demo data

On the dashboard, when you have no real visits yet, use Load demo data to load a fixed set of sample visits (the banner states you are viewing 30 sample learning visits). Clear demo data removes them. Demo mode is intended for training and SLT demos, not for entering real evidence.

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Teacher experience

Home dashboard

Teachers land on a professional learning dashboard (not the leadership tile dashboard): trajectory charts, practice summaries for visits where they are the named teacher, links into visit detail, and (when available) a Download my practice profile (PDF) action.

Two different “reflections”

1. Per-visit reflection — On each visit’s detail page, section Your Reflection (free text, up to 2000 characters). Only the observed teacher can add, edit, or read this. It is stored separately from the observer’s record and is not visible to the observer, to middle leaders, to SLT, or to Learning Lens support — that restriction is enforced by the database, not by the interface.
2. Term private notes — On the teacher dashboard only, a long-form text area is labelled as visible only to you and saves automatically for the current term. That box is not the same as the per-visit reflection above, but the same privacy rule applies to both.

What teachers do not use by default

Teacher accounts are not the main audience for whole-school analytics or Staff administration. Your school may still keep the shortcuts in the header; your own governance should make clear who is expected to record visits.

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Visit list size and “this year”

Visits load in large batches — 500 at a time. If your school has more than that, the dashboard shows Showing X of Y visits this year alongside Load more visits. Analytics cover the same date window as the visits you have loaded and filtered.

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Common workflows

Weekly leadership learning walks

1. Configure or pick a lens aligned to your SIP.
2. Run several New Visit sessions across the week.
3. Review Practice Profile, Patterns, and your Framework tab.
4. Export a term summary PDF from Analytics if helpful for meetings.

Corridor temperature check

1. Make sure your Walkthroughs questions are set up.
2. Run Quick Walkthrough with one question across rooms.
3. Use Walkthroughs analytics and the PDF from the results screen for briefings.

Department conversation

1. Open Departments (Admin/SLT).
2. Pair radar-style views with Practice Profile category narratives.
3. Optionally create a lens targeting weak categories for the next cycle of visits.

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Data protection (high level)

Observation content is stored in the European Union (Frankfurt, Germany), as set out in the current Privacy Policy and Data Processing Agreement; those documents also name the hosting partners we use and what each one does. Who can see what is controlled by role, so colleagues only ever see the data their role allows.

For statutory rights (including the right to complain to the UK ICO if you believe handling is unlawful), see the published privacy documentation.

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Getting help

• Email: jamie@mylearninglens.app
• Further reading: Guides index and the blog.

If anything in this guide does not match what you see on screen, tell us and we will put it right.