PiXL Club is a collaboration of school leaders headed by Sir John Rowling. They’re a not for profit organisation that focuses on supporting and developing the GCSE results of thousands of students in the UK. It currently has over 650 secondary schools involved in the scheme, providing them with resources to help improve students’ results. 

The PiXL Club collaborates with school leaders nationwide to share new ideas and deliver support in order to improve the results of GSCE students across the country. With more than 650 schools in the programme, PiXL needed a central platform where it could share ideas, as well as media content and best practice tips with a large number of people. 

In search of a powerful, easy solution

PiXL offers its members a two-dimensional support system: there are meetings that the head teachers and deputy heads (Raising Standards Leaders) can attend and digital resources available online. PiXL shares a huge digital library online containing best practice tips, motivational presentations, animations, MP3 recordings, and analysis tools. With such a large archive, it was essential they had an easy-to-use collaboration platform with a large amount of storage.

“We used to put resources on the website but the media files were too large and the website couldn’t handle it any more. It hadn’t been designed for storing large files so we needed to find a tool that was up to the job,” says Sian James, Director of Communications and Operations, PiXL.

PiXL carried out some in depth research into the market and the collaboration tools available. Huddle ticked all the boxes. It offers a secure cloud-based collaboration platform, providing the large amount of storage that PiXL required, without having to deploy any additional hardware. 

Up and running at full speed straightaway

“Huddle has helped us to share resources much more efficiently. With the unlimited file size and quick upload speed, we can upload any file to a secure central location. The easy-to-use interface also means that any of our members and staff can get up and running without any training,” explains Sian. 

With so many team members visiting hundreds of different schools across the country, mobile access was incredibly important to PiXL. Staff needed to be able to get all the documents they required from one central location both inside and outside the office. 

Files at your fingertips

“We have found the Huddle mobile apps to be very useful. Our staff members are assigned to different schools across the UK, and we encourage them to take their iPad or tablet with them so they can demonstrate how easy it is to use. They have the files at their fingertips,” says Sian.

Huddle year on year

There are nearly a thousand Huddle users at PiXL. The workspaces have been designed to be an on-going platform for school resources each year. PiXL is currently gearing up for the next academic year.

We want to look at the way we use Huddle and how we can enhance it and develop new workspaces to make processes more streamlined and efficient. Feedback so far has been very positive, and we hope to continue to expand our usage,” concludes Sian.