2013 February

Academies and the Freedom of Information Act

TweetThe number of academies in the UK is increasing by the month and their set-up can often be complex, with multiple parties involved in the running of the school, but the Freedom of Information Act provides a useful tool to … Continue reading

Data sources for higher education – part 1

TweetInvestigating an area such as education is large enough to be half-covered even in projects such as PhDs but there are some sources which provide a helpful start. There are four central sites for higher education data: Ucas, the higher … Continue reading

Savile extracted

On Friday the BBC released documents from The Pollard Report into the Savile inquiry. These were published as scanned PDFs, making it impossible to search text or count mentions of particular terms. We’ve used document extraction service DocumentC…

Hello and goodbye – HMI Health gets new editors

My name is Alex Plough and for the past few months I’ve been working as the special projects editor of Help Me Investigate Health. Regular readers will not recognise my name as I’ve been published little on the blog. But behind … Continue reading

Raided reserves, extra staff, and lots of bunting: how did your council foot the £13m torch relay bill?

By Carol Miers, Juliet Ferguson and Paul Bradshaw Funds intended for maritime festivals, economic development, council reserves and food markets were among pots which were raided to pay for torch relay bills, according to an investigation by Help Me Investigate … Continue reading

BBC College of Journalism teams up with Help Me Investigate for health reporting event

We’ve teamed up with the BBC College of Journalism for an event on reporting the new health system that comes into force this year. From April powers to control health spending, and to hold that to account, will be shifted. Over 200 new groups of …

Hospital food hygiene ratings: how to find them in your area

A version of this post covering schools appears on Help Me Investigate Education. With food hygiene in the news following the horsemeat scandal, I thought I’d put together a quick guide on getting information about your own local hospitals’ hygiene … Continue reading

School food hygiene ratings: how to find them in your area

TweetWith food hygiene in the news following the horsemeat scandal, I thought I’d put together a quick guide on getting information about your own local schools’ hygiene ratings. You can download FSA ratings of food hygiene for each local authority. … Continue reading

Illegal use of B&Bs to house homeless families – how to investigate your local figures (and learn some useful data techniques too)

The Guardian’s Randeep Ramesh reports today on the use of bed and breakfasts to house families beyond the legal time limit of six weeks. The national picture is that half of the 242 authorities who responded had placed homeless families in private … Continue reading

Useful education links for January 11th through February 16th

Tweet These are the education links we found interesting between January 11th and February 16th: University students pay £550,000 fines in a year – Oxford and Cambridge rank seventh and fifth respectively in the fines table. Fines for missing a … Continue reading