Schooloscope

[undyingking]

I could easily spend hours playing with this, and I don't even have kids. Very neat, friendly interface to the morass of data out there about various English school performance indicators.

(Via infosthetics, like many such good things.)

Comments

[chilledchimp.livejournal.com]

I like the cut out and assemble schools. I was a bit disappointed to find they don't resemble to actual buildings, though. I tried a school I used to work at, it is definitely a different shape.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Boo! I guess it would have been quite a labour.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

and I don't even have kids

Whoever wrote it probably doesn't have kids either, or they wouldn't have written it to amplify the worst drawbacks the Ofsted reports already suffer from. Even worse, where it tries to incorporate DCSF data it doesn't bother to reconcile it with the Ofsted data at all, happily declaring that pupils are doing well and in the bottom 25% for the region.

What I'd like to see from such a site is for their map view to annotate the schools via a colour coding for each of the things you might want to measure such as exam results, behaviour, trends and so on with a widget to control which one you're viewing. Also, each school should be rendered in a circle with radius according to size, because big schools and small schools don't compare well. Some annotation for selective admissions might also be a good idea.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, those sound like great improvements! Well, they say it's a work in progress, you could drop them a line.