Grades Tell Part of the Story. Nurture Looks at the Rest.

Schools have more academic data about students than ever before. Grades. Assessment results. Attendance. Learning progress.

These are important indicators. They help educators understand how students are performing and where they may need academic support. But academic data does not always tell the full story. A student’s grades can show how they are performing but they do not necessarily show how they are doing.

A student may be performing well academically while feeling increasingly disconnected from their peers. Another may experience a sudden decline in academic performance, where the underlying issue is not simply a learning gap but stress, disengagement or challenges outside the classroom.

Grades are important. But they are only part of the picture.

The Data Schools Often Do Not See

Many of the factors that shape a student’s experience are difficult to capture through traditional school systems.

How is the student feeling? Do they feel connected to their peers? Do they feel that they belong? Are their experiences or behaviours changing over time?

These questions matter. The World Health Organization estimates that one in seven adolescents globally experiences a mental health condition, which can affect areas of life including school attendance and academic performance.

Student belonging is also an important part of the school experience. According to PISA 2022, 19% of students in Singapore reported feeling lonely at school, while 20% reported feeling like an outsider or left out of things.

These experiences may never appear in a student’s academic record. But they are still part of their educational journey.

Why We Did Not Build Grade Tracking Into Nurture

We deliberately chose not to make Nurture another academic dashboard. Schools already have systems for managing grades, assessments and academic performance.

Instead, Nurture focuses on information that is often harder for schools to capture consistently. Through regular well-being check-ins, self-reflections, sentiment analysis and Social Network Analysis, Nurture gives educators greater visibility into different aspects of a student’s experience.

This does not replace academic data. It complements it. Academic data can help answer: How is this student performing?

Nurture helps schools explore another important question: How is this student doing?

Better Data Should Lead to Better Conversations

Nurture is not designed to diagnose students or replace the professional judgement of teachers and counsellors. A change in a student’s well-being data does not automatically mean something is wrong.

Instead, these signals can provide additional context and help educators identify when it may be worth checking in. The purpose of better visibility is not to turn every student into another data point. It is to make sure that important changes do not go unnoticed.

Looking Beyond the Gradebook

Academic achievement will always be an important part of education. But education is also about well-being, relationships, belonging, personal growth and development.

Schools should not have to choose between understanding academic performance and understanding the student behind it.

They need both.

That is why Nurture was built to complement, rather than replicate, existing academic systems. Because a grade can tell you how a student performed. But it cannot always tell you how that student is doing.