The Department for Education (DfE) has been one of the first departments to embrace open data; teachers and policymakers are already seeing innovative services to help improve standards and pupils and parents will soon be empowered to make more informed school choices.
Combining detailed, anonymised data on every pupil in the country with results from exam boards is only the start, according to Professor Nigel Shadbolt, chairman of the Open Data Institute (ODI) and principal at Jesus College, Oxford. He predicts the truly innovative breakthrough will start when education findings are combined with other datasets to allow parents and students to make more informed decisions.
“Soon enough you’ll be able to compare schools not just by academic results but by transport links and how they would suit your child who is strong in one area but not another,” he says.
“Rather than rely on published league tables with their own criteria, you’ll be able to add your weightings to personalise the data to you.”
A-level choices
That is certainly the intention of a new online service called Skills Route which is launching this month. A winner of the ODI and Nesta’s Open Data Challenge Series, it is designed to guide students, based on their actual or predicted GCSE results, on where they would likely get the best A-level results or which apprenticeship could suit their subjects and grades. It blends DfE information with data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESEA) and the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES).
Mime Consulting, which is behind the new service, already offers a Skills Match online tool, currently in beta testing mode for London, which allows recruiters, employers, education professionals and careers advisers to look at how many people are studying a particular course in higher education compared to how many jobs there are available in that profession.
It is being evaluated by the GLA to determine if it can provide evidence-based statistics for the DfE’s recently-announced Area Based Reviews, which will look at whether the education sector is providing students aged over 16 with the skills both they and potential employers require.
Steve Preston, founder of Mime Consulting said: “The government’s encouraging schools to use a portal to help pupils make more informed decisions about their next steps in education, so we’re hoping Skills Route will be well received.
“Then we’re looking at the next stage with Skills Match to give careers advisers and education professionals real data to show whether they are equipping students with the skills they need to get a good job. It also shows employers which colleges are producing the skills they need so they can foster closer relationships.”
Releasing teacher strain
The problem with education data, to date, is that it places a lot of extra strain on teachers to produce and is rarely properly analysed because it is not presented in a user-friendly way, claims James Weatherill, chief commercial officer at Arbor Education. It means the lessons from the figures are rarely learned and when results are looked at, they seldom compare like-for-like schools.
“Data is quite a bind for teachers to generate and input and it’s never presented back in a way they can really understand,” he says.
“It’s also a pain because they feel it’s used against them as a political weapon whenever league tables are produced which just look at grades but don’t allow people to compare schools like for like. The top private and public schools do well, as do those in wealthy suburbs, leaving too much unfair pressure on teachers at inner city schools who may have higher levels of deprivation and children who don’t speak English as their primary language.
“In my experience, that’s been behind the main reason for caution among teachers. They’re not against offering pupils the chance to make decisions based on data, they’re just concerned that the data is presented in a way that’s fair and compares like for like.”
These open data issues prompted Weatherill to co-found his company which allows primary and secondary schools to generate reports which compare their performance against the national average, local average and, crucially, against schools that are like them.
“We use Department of Education and Ofsted information as well as third-party data, such as crime levels and details of areas of deprivation,” he explains.
“It gives a far fairer view so schools can benchmark their performance against the rest of the country and the ones in their area but also against schools which have a similar pupil profile to themselves. We also look at where they spent their budget and tell them how they did against other schools like them. It’s proving popular among schools wanting to find out if they are optimising the pupil premium extra money they receive for each pupil from a disadvantaged background.”
College and career choices
A glimpse of how pupils and parents might be empowered to make the most informed education and career choices comes from America, via a London-based company, Optimity Advisors. It has been working with its American arm on online services for Texas to allow parents and children to pick the right college and course that will lead to the pupil’s preferred career and income bracket.
“The education data isn’t the issue in the UK, it’s getting wages data from the Treasury that’s holding us back from offering the same service here,” says Andrew Beale, partner at Optimity Advisors.
“If we could get that data, parents and children could start taking some informed decisions about how the right college and course could help them get into the career they are hoping to pursue.”
Clearly, it is still early days for open data in education and the ODI’s chairman, Nigel Shadbolt, is convinced the next couple of years will see the development of services which allow parents and pupils to make smarter, data-driven choices.
However, he also points out, open data will perhaps have its greatest power in revealing to policymakers the areas of the country where there is a lack of choice so counter measures can be taken.
To get weekly news analysis, job alerts and event notifications direct to your inbox, sign up free for Media & Tech Network membership.
All Guardian Media & Tech Network content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled “Brought to you by” – find out more here.
