Data Exchange back on the horizon

[GREED]

With a certain degree of smugness, very happy to have heard this from the Education Secretary at the opening keynote of BETT last week:

 

 

"My department intends to begin prototyping new systems for data collection - data exchange - in 2016. It will implement common data standards and work with the Access 4 Learning Community who have achieved great things locally and internationally.

 

This will make it easier for schools to share data with us. It will reduce our data burden on the sector and provide, and enhance both what we know, and how quickly we know it.

 

Better system integration should allow education technology firms to enable easier data movement within and between schools."

 

Full transcript available here:

 

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/nicky-morgan-bett-show-2016

[CAM]

About time. Tracking KS2 scores is a nightmare, transferring data between two different schools is a nightmare, getting census data back to the government is a nightmare (my database professional friend in the private sector was doubled over laughing when I described it to him).

 

I just hope it's done properly.

[GREED]

Initially, this will not be covering school to school transfers, it is centred on the school to gov hierarchical model - though the recommendations I made to DfE in the report to the last year said otherwise.

[chrisateen]

Does anyone know anything more about the project and where I can get more up to date information about this project?

[GREED]

Yes. What would you like to know. Currently the project is finalising PoC stage before starting work with MIS suppliers on the tech.

 

Plenty of information on the Access4Learning website (formally SIF)

 

https://www.sifassociation.org

 

Is your interest from supplier or school point of view?

[chrisateen]

Its from a potetial research point of view. I want to know what they are doing which will reduce the amount of data collection data managers and schools have to do

 

 

I also saw the website but there is not much info about it

Edited December 18, 2016 by chrisateen

[GREED]

There is a mountain of research and documentation already undertaken to exactly that point. I know because I did it for the DfE...

 

Finding the documents publicly is another thing...

[chrisateen]

There is a mountain of research and documentation already undertaken to exactly that point. I know because I did it for the DfE...

 

Finding the documents publicly is another thing...

 

Why is that the case?

[GREED]

Because to be honest the DfE have not been great at interacting with the schools widely when it comes to this project. If you have been involved with the project at any stage so far then you'll drown in the info available!

[chrisateen]

Potetially why it might be interesting to see if this is really going to support schools enough. Do you know when this may potentially be completed. Edited December 18, 2016 by chrisateen

[GREED]

Pilot schools I believe are expected September. Note that will be pilots and will not be a hard switch over... Likely long parallel usage as it is refined.

[chrisateen]

Also is this primarily for schools to submit the census more easily and will they be including things like transfering data to other schools and obtaining data from the DfE

[GREED]

Replacing census is the primary requirement. Getting data back is not. At least not automatically.

[chrisateen]

Replacing census is the primary requirement. Getting data back is not. At least not automatically.

 

Oh dear not good. Thanks for your help on this it's really useful.

[penfold_99]

Also is this primarily for schools to submit the census more easily and will they be including things like transfering data to other schools and obtaining data from the DfE

 

Census as a concept (ie each doing doing it) will be retired as data exchange enables regular flow flow to the dfe. This allows the dfe to centrally perform a snapshot that fulfills the requirement of census.

 

School 2 Schools transfers have been part of the alpha stage of the project.

[PhilNeal]

I'm not so sure that it will be that easy. We need to allow null entries for validated fields or else schools won't be able to enter children. Will there not be a requirement to validate these i.e. have some form of census check?

[matt40k]

Are you implying their POC will have problems when they start turning it into a real-world application @PhilNeal and they might have to keep some of those old legacy features like manually checking a set times of the year, kind like a census?!?

[PhilNeal]

I think that at the moment many schools make sure their data is accurate at the time of the census. We are required to put in probability checks into MIS software. If the data just leaves the school without a process I'm guessing it will not have the same accuracy as it does today.

[matt40k]

Fixing S2S will help with that. Reviewing practices will also help - things like, not having an address or contact details is just ridiculous. I get the argument that you don't need them to teach, but if your legally responsible for children you should have them in your MIS. Other then that it'll come down to what BI solution they put on top of it and provide to schools and how they relate KPI\alerts to money \ public data. Still by they time they get to BI element well all be retired