What is this site for?
Schooloscope shows you quickly and simply how schools near you are getting on.
We take public information about every primary and secondary school in England and show you exactly what it all means.
We don’t have any political agenda – we just care deeply about education, and want to see happy kids learning well. We think happy kids do better, and that exam results aren’t the be-all and end-all.
We make judgements about schools based on the information we’ve got about them. Our judgements are strictly based on that information and nothing else. When a school is doing well, we will say so. When a school needs to do better, we’ll say that too.
Everything we say is said in a spirit of positive encouragement. All we want is a better education system for the benefit of all children.
What use is it to me?
At the moment, you can use Schooloscope to find out how your local schools are getting on. Everything you need to know about a school can be seen in a glance. You can compare your school with its neighbours.
You can compare schools near your home to help decide which one might suit your child best. You can find out how the school you went to as a child is getting on now.
We plan to add more features to Schooloscope as time goes on. We’ll post something on our blog every time we make any important changes.
Who made it?
The team at BERG. Particularly Tom Armitage, Matt Brown, Matt Jones and Matt Webb. We are not part of Ofsted or any official educational body, although we have used a lot of public information published by
them.
Who paid for it?
Schooloscope is funded by 4iP, an innovation fund set up to support ideas for websites, games and mobile services which help people improve their lives.
Why did you make it?
We care about education. We saw that there’s a lot of public information about schools, but it’s really hard to make sense of it all. So we built Schooloscope to make that task easier.
What’s in it for you?
We hope to make Schooloscope into a commercial product somehow, but we’re still not sure exactly what sort of product that will be. The public information about each school will always be free – we will
never charge people to see it.
Where did you get all this information from?
Our sources are: Ofsted, The Department of Children, Schools & Families, and Edubase.
How can you make judgements about my school?
Official information sources are very dry. They’re all just tables of numbers. We wanted to make them easier to take in, and that means converting numbers into statements.
So, where official figures say that exam results are at “grade 1”, we use the word “impressive”.
And where official numbers for a school’s leadership are high, we say it is “well run.” When the same number is low, we say the school has “management problems.”
I think your judgement about a particular school is wrong.
If you’ve looked at the detailed results about a school and you think we’ve made a mistake, we’ll be happy to take another look at it for you. Please let us know.
The name/town/postcode/web address for my school is wrong. How can I change this?
We get these pieces of information from Edubase. If there’s something wrong with the school’s name, town, postcode, or website address, you’ll need to have this corrected in Edubase, so that we can get the up-to-date information. Edubase’s Frequently Asked Questions pages explain how to correct their information about a school.
Why are some primary schools missing results data from 2010?
In 2010, 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.
As a result of this boycott, the primary school results tables for 2010 don’t report exam results for these schools. 13 local authorities (out of 152) have no data at all, as every school participated in the boycott. Other local authorities have more complete data.
Where a school doesn’t have 2010 results table boycott, owing to this boycott, its academic score (the colour of its roof) is based upon data from 2009.
