Special guests Richard Selfridge and James Pembroke join hosts Tom Sherrington and Emma Turner to discuss the effective uses of education data. Richard and James are data wizards and are masters of not only the analytics of school data but also historians of the ways the UK education system has used data in the past.
James’ background is in data analytics, and he has worked across the education industry for 14+ plus years. Richard began as a primary school teacher, and like many teachers in the so-called ‘data wave’ of the 2010s, felt unsatisfied with the way schools used data to track student success. The two of them connected in 2015 and built a brilliant working partnership on their shared love of challenging data assumptions and as James’ puts it, ‘bursting bubbles.’
A History of Data Practices
The conversation begins by exploring the context for much of the data practices and initiatives. The beginning of the episode focuses on what Richard and James have seen in the past and how schools & governing bodies have taken the lessons of the past to create the systems in play across education in the UK today.
Some of the topics include the data wave, challenging assumptions, and data efficiency. One of the key topics that Tom, Emma, James, and Richard discuss is the idea of levels-based data and how the practice negatively affected perceptions of data. As James says in the podcast, the program attempted to “turn a human opinion into a number.” The group went around telling stories of this system and its inaccuracy for much of the beginning of the podcast.
Despite its inaccuracy, the levels-based system did prompt educators and analysts like James and Richard, to create systems and frameworks for data collection and utilization that fit the education world. As Emma says, a powerful paradigm shift that Richard and James ask educators to make is not having a policy-based framework, but rather, a data strategy framework.
As Richard points out in the podcast, many schools have policy-driven data collection, organization, and analysis. The problem with this is that it doesn’t get to the heart of why you collect data. In order to properly create change using data, you can’t have a disconnected system of multiple policies, you need a well-worked-out strategy to promote efficiency and efficacy.
Effective Data For Schools
In the second part of the episode, the group discusses actionable steps and advice for schools and governing bodies.
As Richard and James put it, there are two kinds of data that are collected from schools, statutory data- primarily large swaths of numbers that are collected and used by the government and data that is usable in everyday contexts. The rest of the conversation focuses on the latter.
A phrase that stuck out in this part of the conversation was “politicians like numbers.” It points out that for the creation of governmental policy, you need large data sets to make a difference. In a school context, you need an understanding of who your students are. The major difference between the two is that schools need to humanize their data. After all, the school’s job is to ensure each of their pupils has the support they need, therefor individualization of data is much more important than large data sets.
As the group points out, large data analysis doesn’t necessarily work in a school environment based on the population size. The example they use is students with learning disabilities. If a school is attempting to look at the percentage of students who need help, 25% of students may only be 7 or 8 pupils, each with individual needs, so it’s not as meaningful to track their progress as a group.
Meaningful Categories of Data For Schools
With a focus on data that is trackable and meaningful to schools, James and Richard have four categories of data that schools can effectively and efficiently track in their book, Dataproof Your School. In the podcast, the group discusses three of the four categories.
#1: Context
- Contextual data like age in cohort, disabilities, language fluency, attendance, etc. are essential to schools’ ability to understand their students and any challenges they may face.
#2: Attainment
- This data is sourced from standardized testing and teacher assessment, which gives schools an understanding of where their students are (based on ranking) and how their teachers perceive student growth.
#3: Development
- James & Richard make a note that they are not tracking progress. Unlike progress which is essentially a qualitative understanding of growth, development tracks actual content understanding. As James points out, progress tends to be an inaccurate measure between two snapshots, development takes a look at hundreds of snapshots and the movement students make along the way to content mastery.
This episode, like all episodes of Mind The Gap takes a deeper look at education from a masterful perspective. James and Richard truly show us the purpose of data and the areas of improvement that schools, governments, and practitioners should be mindful of.
Watch more episodes of Mind The Gap to learn more about making education work across the globe.