Choosing a Primary School: a Use Case for Data Driven Decision making, Analytics and Open Data
Inspiration
This article is about decision making and the use of data to support it. Few weeks ago I attended a workshop where we discussed about the evolution of decision making at CXO level and how that is showing evolution from traditional experience and “gut-feeling†based decision making towards more data driven decision making.
With the current emergence of AI and ML and their use for example making decisions on from example network operations where people feel hesitant about giving the decision making authority to the “machines†m, I felt that this example of data driven decision making is not something that takes anything away from the people in charge. It allows the decisions we make to be better informed and thus make better quality decisions either higher level of confidence that we are making the right decisions.
Over the years I have used similar data analytics approach to:
1. Gather competitor performance and capability data to drive product requirements
2. Analyse market price data to guide the setting of prices for sales
3. Process internal operational data to have an unbiased view of performance, improvement areas and prioritization of features for development
Obviously these are not something that can be share, but the below example shows the principles and an approach that is similar to my approach to the 3 above scenarios.
Background
18 months ago my child reached the age that we needed to start looking at which school would we like him to enroll. If you have experience of the British school system you know that it is a big decision and can drive parents to move home in search of the suitable school.
Probably the most used reference to evaluate the school is the Ofcom report, which provides a nice simplified way of grading the different schools from outstanding to Improvement required. All the schools also organise tours for prospective parents where they tell about their staff, values, curriculum, etc.
Already Available
Gov.uk has plenty of information available for digestion but each school is on it’s own page, all the details are behind a click so doing a comparison of the schools is not an easily performed task.
Gov.UK
Ofstead
Open Data from Gov.uk
Luckily for an data driven nerd like myself UK government publishes all this underlying data available for down load and further processing. So I proceeded promptly to download the data and imported it to my tool of choice which happens to be Microsoft PowerBI for it’s ease of use (mainly because it’s really close to Excel which I have professionally grown up with) and choice of visualisations. As the data was segregated to multiple disperse tables 1st step was to build the links between the different tables by using the unique school identifier each table had.
After this it was down to select the data to be used for the school analysis where a wide variety of information is available. By using the PowerBI Key influencers functionality:
We chose the following:
School, Total Number Of Pupils, % Non-Native Speakers, % On Free Lunches, % Of Special Needs, Pupil:Teacher Ratio, Locality, Town, Schooltype, Starting Age, Ofsted Rating, Ofsted Inspection Date, School Phase, Number Of Teachers, Number Of , Teaching Assistants, Mean Salary Of All Teachers, Number Of Support Staff, School Income, School Expenditure, ICT Spending, Learning Spending, Premises Spending, Learning Materials Spending.
Next step was to establish the minimum and the maximum value for each data field. This is later used to make the numbers easier to consume by converting them into a five star rating.
So on to performing the analysis
Narrowing down the schools by Stage, Age, and Location
This allows to narrow down to the appropriate set of schools.
What information is visualised
It's worth mentioning that this analysis is build to allow the comparison of schools that at high level have been rated the same by Ofstead for example.
School Locations
This allows to have a look at the location of schools relative to your place of residence.
领英推è
Financial Aspects
This allows to have a look at the financial health of the school and how they invest in different aspects of the school expenditures. This is to evaluate if they they financially healthy. How much they are investing in computers and technology, how much to learning materials , premises upkeep - general feel for their priorities
Pupil Body composure
This allows to have a look at the school size and how the pupil body is structured. This will allow to see from if your child would be a minority as a non-native english speaker, how used the school is to accommodating special needs to basic things like how big is the school, how well staffed they are.
Further Details
This allows to have a look at the Ofstead Star Ratings, # of teachers and support staff, mean salary of the teaching staff. Ofcom score is pretty obvious, but other things like support staff indicate how much time the teachers have time to focus on their main job which is teaching, well paid teachers would tend to stay longer and give more continuity and not worry about other things.
Star Ratings
Then based on personal preferences each category was assigned a star rating which makes discussions with wider audience easier as you will not get stuck on the numbers and can focus on the discussion of the relative merits - is 4 stars here better then 5 stars there…
Bringing it all together
These allows to have a look at the all the different aspects discussed above in a single view.
Final Set of Data
In the British system school places are allocated according to a school catchment area i.e. pupils from the catchment area get preference over pupils from outside of the catchment area. Pupils from outside of the catchment area are accepted if there is space available in the classes. As our analysis showed that for our preferred school we would be outside of the catchment area the next topic to look into was is it feasible to expect a successful application given the above. This was addressed via two pronged analysis:
- During school visit asking the head teacher had out of catchment pupils been accepted in previous year – yes –, how many – 10+ and were the classes all full - No
- Looking up another UK.gov statistics on births in England and taking an analytical look at the birthrates – down in England as a whole – Yea – ,but up in our area – Bummer
Closer look at the numbers though showed that the increase in birth was not that big when divided across the entire school district.
Making the Decision
The above data can be used to narrow down the schools that you visit and after visiting the schools reinforce the information the school has shared and then allow the decision to be made according to the priorities that you have for your child's school selection and educational journey.
And a similar journey can be applied to business decisions.
Some useful links to explore: