Shutters Down

Hi folks — some sad news today: over the next few weeks, we’ll be shuttering Schooloscope, and wrapping up our journey into UK schools.

A bit of background…

As I imagine you know, the creation of Schooloscope was funded by 4iP (the venture arm of Channel 4, one of the UK’s main broadcasters), although the design and development was handed entirely by BERG. We took as our mission to talk about schools by demystifying UK government data. All those exam league tables and school inspection reports… what do they mean? Schooloscope was created to provide a way in to this often arcane data, to build engagement around the education of pupils among everyone involved.

So we developed a site with friendly icons, simple language, and big maps – all based on the complex and hard-to-deal-with data underneath (from a multitude of sources) – and began publishing for all state-run primary and secondary schools in England.

We added comparisons, a special measurement of “pupil happiness” (based on several bits of data from the official reports) to offset the traditional focus on exams, integration with Facebook and Twitter, and even cut-out-and-keep model paper schools.

It’s been a ton of fun to build and run! The feedback has broadly been tremendous — we’ve met people who have found Schooloscope useful in moving house, getting to know a neighbourhood, having a first glimpse at a school, or generally starting to understand UK education. The conversations it has triggered have been brilliant, really moving away from the competitive exam model, and more towards what we should value in schools. There have been difficult conversations to: we’ve had bugs to fix, and we’ve continually developed our measures of “judgement” and “happiness” to reflect what we and site users feel is fair.

But all good things have to come to an end.

The story today

Keeping the site up-to-date takes a lot of work because there’s always new data, and also because the intricacy in the information is always changing. For example, can you compare the official average exam “point score” in core subjects year on year? Yes, sometimes, but no other times (the official calculation changes). We have to know that. Or there’s a new type of school that starts. Or that we find a bug! There’s always customer service to do too.

Schooloscope has been a huge success in terms of showing a need for this kind of approach. But as our funding came to a conclusion, we found that building the team needed to maintain the site would also mean transforming it into a different kind of beast. It needs skills we don’t focus on at BERG — if BERG was a different shaped company, I’m sure Schooloscope would be a great fit. So we looked at long term partnerships and ways to help the site become self-sustaining, but ultimately none of these came through.

And that brings us to a more serious problem:

When it comes down to it, Schooloscope is a publisher. Although the majority of our feedback has been good, some of it points out flaws. While we were under heavier development, this was really useful because we could make improvements responsively.

But if we’re not able to be as responsive, then what Schooloscope would actually be doing is publishing information we can’t stand behind 100%. And we don’t want that!

So we ran an internal review to figure out whether we could keep the site up-to-date and as responsive as you – its users – deserve, just running it as a hobby. And I’m really sad to report that we can’t.

Shutters down

Shutters down it is. We’ll be taking Schooloscope down in the next 4-6 weeks.

This is hugely disappointing for the team, because we believe deeply in making government information friendlier and more approachable, and constructively putting forwards other ways to thing about schools. A focus on pupil happiness and gentle education about data would, we believe, result in greater engagement of parents and caregivers in their schools and children’s educations.

I hope it isn’t the end of the story for the spirit of Schooloscope. I would love to see these other viewpoints re-emerge in other projects. And I believe deeply in the power of friendly automatic journalism – across massive sets of data – to humanise and make visible the often impenetrable machinery of the state… especially to audiences who would more normally never encounter the spreadsheets and tables on which Schooloscope was based.

Thank you

It just remains for me to thank the team – our friends at 4iP, our collaborators and folks we’ve met along the way, everyone at BERG, and especially Kari, Tom Armitage and Matt Brown (Tom and Matt have since moved on) – because I believe it’s a wonderful site, something nuanced and special – and thank you all for being with us on this journey.

Thanks!

The March Update

Just a brief announcement of the latest data update to Schooloscope. This month, we’ve updated our Ofsted inspection data, adding over 1500 new inspections to the Schooloscope database. That means we’ve also updated the happiness scores for many schools.

In case you’re wondering why an inspection in early March isn’t on the site – we haven’t got that data from Ofsted yet. The most recent inspections in this update are from the middle of February.

The January Release

January’s release is all about data. Last December, we didn’t include the Key Stage 2 league tables when they came out because around a quarter of the primary schools in England boycotted those tests. There would be more work necessary to incorporate that data fairly.

We’ve now incorporated all that data.

Schools which did participate in the KS2 tests use the latest information from 2010 to calculate their academic score – represented by their roof colour.

For those schools that took part in the boycott, we’ve used their exam scores from 2009 as compared to the 2009 average to calculate their academic score. We think that’s fair. Schools that only have 2009 information won’t have “merit badges” for academic scores, because those are calculated against the 2010 figures for the LEA.

The 2010 primary school league tables no longer list results for science – which is sadly why you won’t see science merit badges for primary schools any more.

And, of course, all the primary school results tables are up-to-date with the latest information.

2010 Primary School League Tables

The 2010 Key Stage 2 league tables for schools in England came out on Tuesday this week (December 14). Schooloscope uses scores from these tables to talk about exam results for primary schools.

The data we currently use is a year old, from 2009. We’ve decided to not use the 2010 figures yet.

This year, following industrial action led by the National Union of Teachers and the National Association of Headteachers, around one in four primary schools in the UK boycotted the SATs sat by pupils at the end of Key Stage 2. So the 2010 tables don’t report exam results for these schools.

The boycott varies by region. There are 13 local authorities (out of 152) where every school participated in the boycott. Other local authorities have far more complete data.

This all means that we don’t have enough information to make judgments for around 4,000 primary schools based on their latest data. (There are nearly 15,000 in England).

Were we to update Schooloscope right now with the latest data, a lot of schools on the site would “disappear” – becoming grey dots on the map, their pages now disabled.

That doesn’t feel like the right thing to do.

We’d like to find a way to compare like with like, and we’d like to be able to recognise schools that participated in the boycott without removing them from the site. As a result, it’s going to take longer than we’d like to incorporate the 2010 primary school data into the site in a fair and appropriate way – but we hope you can understand why.

The December (Data) Release

A small but significant update for December. Today, we’ve updated all the data in Schooloscope.

The new Ofsted inspection data means we’ve updated the Happiness grades for around 1000 schools (about 1 in 20 schools on Schooloscope) that have been inspected since our summer data update. This means that our judgments of many schools are now based on much more up-to-date information.

We’re also using the latest data from Edubase, which is our primary source of information about schools themselves. It also means that – as long as they’ve got appropriate data – we can include more recently opened schools in Schooloscope. And it means that little details like the names and websites of schools are more up-to-date.

(The Results Tables haven’t changed because there’s no new information, yet, to display. Rest assured when new results data comes out from the Department of Education, we’ll be working on integrating it into Schooloscope swiftly).

As part of this work, we’ve also worked on improving the systems behind-the-scenes that import all this information, in order to make it easier to update our source data in future. That’s important, because in order to keep Schooloscope as accurate – and fair – as possible, we need to keep it as up-to-date as possible.

And, of course, we’ve also been fixing small issues and speeding the site up wherever we can.

The October Release

The October release brings a large piece of new functionality: league tables.

Schooloscope now has league tables for every area in the UK, for the past ten years. They look like this:

These tables present the Department for Education league table data that we already use – but it’s now much easier to see how schools compare to one another. The latest tables also have some extra icons to highlight things we think are important: whether a particular figure awards that school a merit badge, and whether a particular value has been consistently rising or falling over the past two years. And, of course, you can sort schools by any of the numeric values in the table – just click the column-headers at the top of the table.

Schooloscope isn’t just about academic performance, though: as our “Chernoff schools” make clear, we’re interested in how happy children are at school. So, side-by-side with our exam results tables, we also have happiness tables. You can flip between tables for exam results and happiness at the top right of the results pages.

By default, the happiness table orders schools by our happiness score – but you can also sort schools by any of the Ofsted grades that go to make that up. This isn’t quite like sorting a league table; there are only four different happiness grades (from Schooloscope), and each Ofsted grade is also out of four. Although a school might come above another in the table, they might really be about equivalent. So we’ve put useful headings into the table to indicate where the category boundaries are.

Our other new feature for October is embeddable badges of your school.

At the top left of a page about a school you’ll now see the links to share this school on Twitter and Facebook – along with a new link, that’ll give you the code to embed a badge in your webpage. It’ll look a bit like this:

A nice way to share your school with the word. And: we don’t ever display negative remarks on badges; only positive comments. That’s only fair, if you’re going to be putting the badge on your site!

Behind the scenes, our new tables have changed some of the maths we use.

On the happiness side, we’re now using five scores to calculate happiness: Behaviour, Enjoyment, Care and Guidance, Teaching, and Attendance – and our algorithm places emphasis on pupils’ Behaviour and Enjoyment. The results are, we think, a bit fairer.

On the academic side, we’ve changed how we award merit badges. Previously, we used to give a merit badge for a subject (like English or Maths) to schools that were above or below the local average – by even the tiniest amount. That wasn’t really very fair – so we now give merit badges to schools in the top or bottom 25% of their local area for that particular topic. This means that some schools will now have fewer badges than they did before. If a school does have academic badges now, though, it means it’s doing really well (or not very well at all) at a particular subject. Again, we think this is a fairer representation of real achievement.

And that’s everything that’s new in October. Special thanks must go to Ben Griffiths, whose back-end work on the DCSF tables for the last release made our new league tables possible. We’re always interested in your feedback on Schooloscope. You can contact us via feedback@schooloscope.com, or find us as @schooloscope on Twitter.

The July Release

We’ve focused on two main areas for our July release: improving the information in Schooloscope, and adding easy and fun ways of sharing the information you find on Schooloscope with your friends.

Most noticeably: we’ve added a more tangible way to share your schools’ information: as a cut-out-and-keep model! You’ll find a perforated corner on a school page, which will let you download a PDF of your model – all that remains is to print it out and stick it together.

Also, it’s now easy to share school pages and comparison pages on Twitter and Facebook. We’ve added a little pair of links at the bottom of each type of page. If you want to share Schooloscope information on Facebook, you’ll be asked to let us post to your wall. There’s nothing to worry about here – all we’ll be adding is a little link in your activity stream that looks a bit like this:

or this:

What have we done to improve our information?

Firstly, we’ve brought our OFSTED reports right up-to-date. Several of you commented that some of the reports on Schooloscope were now out of date, and that was something we wanted to address. We’ve added over 4000 new reports to the site and, of course, updated all the school pages to match – so your school might have new information available.

We’ve also done some behind-the-scenes work on how DCSF tables are stored and utilised. There’s no new information here, so you shouldn’t notice any difference for now – but the next release should build on this in a much more visible way.

That’s all the headline news for July; we hope you continue to enjoy using Schooloscope, and as ever, we’re always interested in your feedback. Get in touch via feedback@schooloscope.com, or find us as @schooloscope on Twitter.

The June Release

It’s a little over a month since Schooloscope launched. Since then, we’ve had lots of comments and feedback on the site. All of that’s been much appreciated, and it’s helped us to fix some important issues and understand what’s important to people using the site.

Today, we’re launching the June release of Schooloscope, which adds some new features and fixes some of the issues you’ve reported. What’s new in the June release?

You’ll notice that we’ve totally overhauled our search pages, making them a bit clearer. What you might not notice if that we’ve overhauled our search backend as well: it’s a bit smarter, and it’ll let you search for schools by the town they’re in as well as by name.

You can now also search Schooloscope by postcode. If you search for a postcode, you’ll be taken to a new map view, showing you that postcode and the schools nearby. As you drag the map, the list of schools on the left will update to match those visible on screen.

It’s now possible to compare two schools side-by-side. You’ll find links to this on the pop-up speech bubbles of schools on the background map of another school’s page; you can also go directly to the “Compare Schools” page from the footer of the page. Note that you won’t be able to compare primary schools to secondary schools: it’d be a bit like comparing apples with oranges.

On top of this, there are several other small fixes and improvements around the place; thanks to those of you you’ve pointed out many of these small issues.

That’s it for this month. We should have another release in around a month’s time, again containing a mixture of new features and improvements to existing ones. In the meantime, you can stay up-to-date here on the Schooloscope blog, and also at @schooloscope over on Twitter.

Branded tea

It’s not real until there are mugs.

This morning we’re going over feedback, looking and bugs, and figuring out which features to put into the next release. And drinking tea.

Hello!

We’ve launched!

If you or your kids go to a state school in England, Schooloscope tells you how your school’s doing, at a glance.

Tom Armitage, Matt Brown, Matt Jones, Kari Stewart and I (Matt Webb) are from the design studio BERG. We’re making Schooloscope, funded by 4iP. We’ll be looking after you while you’re here, and working on the site in the coming months. Hello!

Read the launch press release, and a load of background info over at BERG.

Lots to come.

In the meantime, tell us what you think either here in the comments, or at feedback@schooloscope.com.