SchoolDash – using publicly available data to understand schools in England 27 June 2023
In this talk, Timo Hannay, founder of SchoolDash, will draw on case studies from a wide variety of initiatives with vendors, charities, policy-makers and media organisations to show just what it's possible to discover and how to go about it.
In this talk, Timo Hannay, founder of SchoolDash, will draw on case studies from a wide variety of initiatives with vendors, charities, policy-makers and media organisations to show just what it's possible to discover and how to go about it.
For more than a decade, the Department for Education and other bodies have been releasing unprecedented amounts of public data about the state education system in England. These cover not only academic attainment but almost every aspect of school activities, from financials and staffing to pupils' characteristics and post-school destinations. For anyone supporting or selling into the English school system, these represent a vital but under-appreciated resource. They can be used to understand national trends, track policy effects, benchmark individual schools and enable intelligent targeting – if you know how. Topic areas that will be covered in this session include:
- Understanding the post-pandemic increase in pupil absence
- Tracking Ofsted's evolving interests and priorities
- Uncovering patterns in school income and expenditure
- Distinguishing between different types of disadvantage
- Monitoring the overheated teacher recruitment market
- Characterising and segmenting schools
- Following education-related trends in social media
- Building a chatbot to advise on school choice
Guest Speaker - Timo Hannay, Founder, SchoolDash
Timo is the founder of SchoolDash, an education data analytics firm that works with a wide range of collaborators, including media, publishers, EdTech, charities, trusts and government. He is also a non-executive director of SAGE Publishing and of Arden University, and an advisor to Ada Lovelace Day and Maths4Girls. He was previously the founding managing director of Digital Science and before that variously ran the online business of Nature Publishing Group, worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, wrote for The Economist, and investigated brain physiology at the University of Oxford and Waseda University in Tokyo.
Please email eventsteam@besa.org.uk with any questions that you may have.
