Comparing schools

[stubiff]

I came across this the other day and thought it may help if you are in a position to choose between schools.

schoolslikeyours.ffteducationdatalab.org.uk/

There are (at least) two ways you could use it:

1. Find a school, clear the filters and similarity criteria, add Distance (School characs) to both those (pink icon and blue icon). Click on the Distance filter and enter a max number of km.

You should now see the closest schools in the Table tab below. Click on the number dropdown (20,50) to see more. Click on the green icons to add/remove that column from the table.

A reasonable comparison would be to - click Charts tab, select P8 Maths in 'data', select Scatter plot, select P8 English in 'horizontal axis'. Or use any other measure which is important to you.

1. Compare said school to similar other ones nationally.

Clear all the filters and similarity criteria. Select blue icons which will list schools which are similar, e.g. Prior KS2 Attainment, KS4 pupils, Average Entries, FSM%, EAL%, or anything else that you think would make them similar. Click on each criteria to change the weighting if required, e.g. more to Prior Attainment. Then add filters if required, e.g. gender or LA. Repeat the chart.

Note - am only raising this as an aid to comparing schools, not suggesting that it is the only thing to use.

Can't get it to work on a tablet. Can't even enter the first school.

Only tried on a laptop, don't have a tablet.

The field is a 'type start of school name, then choose from the dropdown' type.

That part of the screen doesn't even come up on the tablet. Or a phone. I'll have a look on the laptop later as it sounds very interesting.

Just tried on my phone.
You can get into the 'selection' part by tapping on the menu icon on the left, but it is very fiddly, so would recommend a laptop!

Can’t get it to work on my mobile (Safari). Sounds very similar to the Government compare tool which I find interesting. What neither will tell you is ethos, pastoral care, how they massage their figures, whether it is a good fit for your DC etc so no replacement for actually visiting the school --or gossiping on mumsnet --.

Agreed, and I’m not saying it’s a substitute for visiting schools.

It’s like a much, much worse version of www.compare-school-performance.service.gov.uk/ You can compare similar schools using schools-financial-benchmarking.service.gov.uk/

Whoever designed that website should be taken out back and shot, it’s absolutely appalling. Fails to render correctly on the two devices I’ve tried and is considerably more difficult to use than the .gov.uk services.

@MoltoAgitato, a bit harsh!

Re The Gov Finance site - you can compare similar schools but only financially. Don't think the average parent would be bothered with that, I certainly wasn't.

Re the Gov Performance site - you can't compare similar schools academically. There are also no graphs.
As the url of the FFT site suggests, its primary purpose is to compare similar schools.

Am not, in any way, saying it is better than the Gov site, but can be used in addition to.

I can only get it to work on a PC. Just put in DD's school and yes it does come up with similar schools but all are many miles away some are three times the size (but I could apply the pupil population filter to correct this). I don't know the number of people who would say 'I like school x and would move anywhere in the country to a similar school' as that seems to be the default type of audience the quick results is aiming at.

It also doesn't include the basic data for Independent schools that the government tool does include.

If I was an educationalist wanting to learn about how schools like ones I was trying to support go about things it might be useful. If I were such a person I would probably want to filter by categories I would want to emulate and many of these are just not things that are recorded like approaches to discipline, homework, monitoring progress etc, but I suppose that is why some heads or deputies seem to spend lots of time visiting other schools or coming to DD's school to find out what does go on!

Petts,

Re Independents - yes the Gov site has data but it's meaningless as a lot of them take iGCSE which aren't included in the Gov data.

Main use of it for me would be to 'filter' so you'd get as similar schools as poss, then compare P8.
If a school I was interested in had significantly worse Eng and Maths P8 compared to similar schools, then I'd be looking into what else was going on there.

I think it could be very useful if you need to move for work and have a clear idea what type of school you’d like DC to be educated at.