There is a small community of people with both experience of our schools and the skills to analyse large scale datasets. We would love to make this community bigger. This summer (starting 3rd August) we are hosting paid interns who have experience of teaching or working with schools to learn how to use the large-scale [...]
The next NPD User Group meeting will be held on Friday 12th June 2015 10:30am-5pm at Department for Education, Sanctuary Buildings Great Smith Street, London SW1P 3BT The meeting provides an opportunity for users of the National Pupil Database to learn about new developments and meet other users. At the meeting in June [...]
Last week we published a report with data that suggests non-physics graduates can teach physics to GCSE standard just as well as physics graduates. Does mean that the Government’s battery of programmes to get physics and maths specialists into teaching is unnecessary? Probably not, for two reasons: 1. We appear to be hurtling into a [...]
Today Policy Exchange have published a lengthy report ‘A Rising Tide’ claiming competitive benefits of free schools. The premise is that neighbouring schools have improved their results due to the threat of loss of pupils to a new free school. It is certainly possible that this might have happened. Any headteacher at an undersubscribed school [...]
It has been well reported that women fall behind men in their rates of promotion to school senior leadership positions. The well-versed reasons for this are similar to other professions, with women taking more time than men out of the labour market when they become parents, many deliberately choosing to take lower responsibility roles and [...]
We want the nation’s children to be taught by teachers who are passionate experts in the subject they teach. There is widespread concern that many children are taught science and maths by teachers without an academic degree in the subject. This shortage is most acutely felt in physics, with large numbers of unfilled teacher training [...]
It is actually quite hard to say anything about the causal impact of grammar schools. There is no such thing as selective and non-selective areas: 1 in 5 grammar school students cross over a local authority border on the way to school. And perhaps as many as 1 in 5 grammar school students were not in [...]
This evening we launch Education Datalab with a report ‘Seven things you might not know about our schools'. Rich data on our schools has been available for over a decade now but, as we hope this report shows, there is still much we can learn. Every piece of analysis we show in this report is [...]
Education Datalab brings together a group of expert researchers who all believe we can improve education policy by analysing large datasets. In this week of our launch I’ll explain what we hope to achieve. This is something I’ve had to think a lot about these past few weeks. I went on leave from my academic [...]
