We’ve often said that you cannot compare the performance of schools with different intakes.
But you might want to compare the performance of schools sharing similar intakes.
Or there might be other reasons you want to compare one school to another.
You might want to benchmark financial and workforce resources rather than performance. You might want to find schools that were performing like yours in the past but which have since improved so you can find out how they have done it.
It’s also the case that there are an infinite number of ways of defining similar schools, and the best way of doing it for one purpose may not be the best way of doing it for another.
To look at these sorts of questions from a variety of different angles, we’ve built Schools Like Yours, a resource that allows you to find schools similar to your own – where you define what similar means.
Only interested in schools within a certain geographic distance of your own that have disadvantage rates close to yours? Other Catholic schools? Other junior schools?
All of those are among the filters you can apply.
You can then view and download a range of publicly available data about the set of schools like yours.
So far, the tool is available for mainstream Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 4 schools. They both contain data on:
- performance (last three years);
- school characteristics (governance, region, denomination etc.);
- pupil characteristics;
- absence;
- finance;
- workforce;
- Ofsted ratings
If it proves popular, we’ll keep adding to it.
Try finding similar schools to your own now: visit Schools Like Yours.
And let us know what you think of the tool – get in touch via Twitter or email.
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Is there a reason that % Boys ( or % Girls) isn’t available as a similarity criteria? We have a state-funded Girls Academy in our area which means other schools have 60 – 65% Boys on their roll which is likely to impact on whole school measures. It would therefore be good to use Schools Like Yours to identify other schools which have a skewed gender profile but are co-educational.
Thanks
Hi Mike, thanks for the suggestion – this isn’t something we’d thought of. We’ve just added it in an update to Schools Like Yours that we’ve released this morning though, based on your feedback. Do let us know if you find anything interesting using this new feature.
It would be helpful if we could have disadvantaged as a similarity criteria rather than just FSM. For us the figures are very different
Hi Julie, thanks for your comment. The percentage of pupils in the 2018 KS2/KS4 cohort who are FSM6 is available within the tool (available under the ‘KS2 performance, 2018’/’KS4 performance, 2018’ headings). Does that meet your needs, or would that be quite different to a whole-school figure in your case?
is the data currently showing in relation to mean staff sick days representative of the academic year 2019-20 or 2018-19?
Hi Sarah, thanks for your query. At the minute, the workforce data that’s used is 2018/19 data (from Nov 2018). Full details of the data used can be found on the ‘guide’ page of Schools Like Yours: https://schoolslikeyours.ffteducationdatalab.org.uk/guide.php
This has been a useful tool. I find that the most useful indicator of school similarity is proportion of SEN as well as long term disadvantage (i.e. always FSM). Is there any way of adding in these characteristics?
Hi Kevin. Thank you- and sorry for the slow response. We’ll be putting proportion of SEN in the next release some time next month. Data on long-term disadvantage is not currently published unfortunately so we wouldn’t be able to include it. Not only that, the means to measure it reliably has disappeared – more on that in https://ffteducationdatalab.org.uk/2021/10/how-free-school-meal-eligibility-has-been-changing-and-why-we-might-need-new-measures-of-disadvantage/