Too often, the performance of a school is boiled down to the results it produces in final exams,  but what about all those amazing activities that don’t have an exam or a qualification?

Badges in a school setting can provide a different kind of value – rather than a score or grade, they can provide the opportunity to recognise achievements, attitudes to learning, social and emotional values, and key employability skills that may not be recorded in an exam or test.

Teachers and other staff are vital in this space through their proximity to students and ability to use badges as character references. Rather than be limited to a formal framework or rigorous assessment method to identify which students have achieved something, badges can give teachers and other staff the power to reward a job well done in a process as simple as asking themselves “has this student earnt the badge?”

Another use for badges in a school setting is as an evaluation and reporting tool to track development of soft skills and engagement, and provide evidence of Gatsby Benchmarks being met through student career activities.

• Practical elements of study, e.g. projects
• Sports and clubs
• Student leadership
• Work experience
• Volunteering

When writing badges for a school setting, consider what “success” looks like outside of exam results. With a set curriculum, badges can provide students with the opportunity to experience success and help to maintain engagement.

Perhaps you have some core school values, attitudes or behaviours that matter and can be celebrated?

This badge works as an example of a way to engage and reward positive learner behaviour that does not rely on their academic performance, particularly for students that might be struggling but are still trying.

Its alignment with the Skills Builder Universal Framework provides an avenue for a recipient to learn about their achievement in a broader context and how they might progress these skills in future endeavours.

This format could be adapted to cover a wide range of wide range of desirable skills, attitudes and values, for example, communication, digital literacy, and self-motivation. 

Want to use this badge? Click the link for an Excel spreadsheet containing all of the badge data, ready to be copied and customised.

To use an exemplar badge and make it your own:

1. Download the spreadsheet and customise to your needs.
2. On your digital badge issuing platform of choice, create a new badge and input the badge data from the spreadsheet.
3. Edit and adapt the data to suit your needs.
4. Publish the badge / make it available for issuing.

While all badges that follow the Open Badge Standard will contain the same core components, different issuing platforms can label and format them differently and often have different approaches to applying settings and attributes to a badge.

Don’t panic – the excel file contains all the information you’ll need to build the badge on your chosen issuing platform (full list of Open Badge platforms) and come readily formatted with instructions for three popular issuing platforms: Open Badge Factory, Navigatr, and Credly.

Consider these badges as templates – it is always recommended to ensure your badges are adapted to your needs and tailored to be relevant to your recipients. This will ensure that your badge is meaningful and valued by those you issue it to.

Examples of customising an exemplar badge to fit your needs could include:

• Expanding on the information to add specific detail about an activity you will issue the badge for.
• Adjusting language to suit your organisation’s brand.
• Adding a location.
• Removing any elements you feel are not relevant to your badge recipients.

The platform examples provided in our exemplar badges are intended to help illustrate how a set of badge data may require adjusting to fit the issuing platform being used. Which badging platform you choose will depend on the on your individual use case and the functionality you require. The Digital Badging Commission does not endorse any particular badging platform. A full list of Open Badge platforms is maintained by 1EdTech.

If you represent an Open Badge platform and would like to be included in our exemplar files, please provide us with an excel sheet containing our exemplar data mapped to your system and we will add you to the download files.