askEddi bring Open Data Project to ASCL Conference 2020
askEddi are delighted to be attending the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) Conference in March, bringing the Open Data Project to forward thinking school leaders.
Presented by ASCL themselves, the Open Data Project for Schools is powered by the askEddi platform and is setting a new standard in how schools use their own data.
The ASCL 2020 Conference takes place in Birmingham, UK on 13 and 14 March 2020 will be centred around “Diverse Leadership”, welcoming a range of well regarded speakers to discuss topics of diversity in leadership.
Key themes of the conference include collaboration, looking to the future and making the most of the wide variety of backgrounds that make up the UK’s school leadership teams.
The Open Data Project for Schools will help facilitate all of these themes, and more, by providing a platform where school leaders can see their data in real time, and collaborate with others to gain insights and new ideas. Using data more effectively will help leaders to implement their school improvement plans and, ultimately, ensure better learning outcomes for pupils.
Following an extensive pilot, ASCL (supported by askEddi as a technical partner) is making its collaborative Open Data Project available for all schools. Data from schools’ management systems (or any other source) can be used to support individual or groups of schools to learn from each other.
The schools involved in the pilot have been able to visualise attendance data in new and powerful ways. By sharing this data it has become possible to uncover previously unknown issues which impact on attendance such as pupils’ birthdays or annual events such as Christmas Jumper Day, to investigate the impact of local authority decision making around school holidays and to begin to anticipate risk triggers for individual pupils’ attendance by using machine learning.
Duncan Baldwin, Deputy Director of Policy at ASCL explains: “Schools are used to collecting and processing data for a range of purposes, but too often this is used purely to drive external accountability. Much of the potential learning from this data is lost. Using modern dashboards and analytical methods allows us to explore links and patterns in schools’ data which were previously unknown.
“Government driven accountability can go some way to improving a system. But to become truly great, schools themselves need to drive improvement. Understanding what works, by sharing aggregated data of any type, allows schools to test and learn from each other.
“Our Open Data Project for schools has been developed by school leaders to show what they need to improve their schools. We are now looking to develop this as widely as possible. For example we can empower school improvement by sharing subject level residuals to inform CPD, facilitating transition by moving data from primary to secondary schools or by allowing schools to tackle serious issues such as boys’ reading. All of this is under a single platform, with school leaders steering the direction and ensuring ethical use of the data.”
The team will be at the ASCL 2020 conference to answer your questions – visit Duncan’s breakout “Why collaboration is the future for accountability” or visit stand 19.
Or if you’re ready, you can join the Open Data Project here and ensure your school is part of the development of the future of data.
