Schooloscope

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.