Schooloscope looks through the latest data from Ofsted reports and Achievement and Attainment tables from The Department For Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) for your school. We pick out what we think are the most useful numbers, and explain them in simple, straightforward sentences. Every sentence is linked to the data, so you can jump straight to the numbers if you prefer.
Every school is also represented by an icon, made up of three parts.
A school can be small, medium or large. We work this out by looking at the sizes of all the schools we know about, and dividing them into 3 groups.
A school’s roof can be coloured red, amber or green, depending on how well the kids there are doing at exams. We generate this by looking at a school’s Average Point Score, which is supplied by DCSF, and working out if a school is above or below the national average.
A school can have one of four types of face, depending on how happy we think the kids are there. We work this out by looking at and combining a few numbers in every Ofsted report: Care, Guidance and Support, Teaching and Learning, Enjoyment of Pupils, Behaviour and Attendance.
We also look at the circumstances a school is in. If a school has a higher than average number of pupils who are from low-income families, or who need extra help with their schoolwork, we’ll say so. At the minute, this is generated from DCSF figures for the number of pupils receiving Free School Meals, the number of pupils with Special Educational Needs, and a calculation of pupils’ ability when they started at the school. In future, we’d like to use more figures, such as the number of pupils who speak English as a second language.
We also display merit badges or alerts when a school is doing really well, or has problems. These come from both Ofsted reports and DCSF tables. You can go to an individual school’s page and click on them to see exactly what data they’re based on.
We then generate an overall score for a school, by taking all the points we’ve looked at about a school – how happy the kids are, and how well they’ve been doing at exams over the past few years.
Finally, we combine this score with what Ofsted call a school’s Capacity to Improve. This helps us form a unique conclusion about a school – whether we feel great, hopeful about a school, or whether we see warning signs.
Overall, we want to make schools data more useful for more people – especially people who don’t like reading tables and statistics. Also, a school isn’t just a set of league tables, it’s a community of people. We’re trying to reflect that. And in the future, we’re planning to do a whole range of interesting things with schools data that you won’t be able to get anywhere else.
Schooloscope is in beta at the minute, and we only work with the information we know about. We’ll be working hard over the coming months to improve things and introduce new features, so we’d really love to know what you think – get in touch by sending an email to feedback@schooloscope.com.
