TweetInfo4local.gov.uk is a useful government website providing feeds and email alerts on a range of services – including education.
The registration page for email alerts gives an indication of how narrowly or widely your free subscription can cover – from specific issues, regions and departments to a combination of all of them.
Useful for keeping up to date with developments. Do you know of other sources of regular updates on education?
TweetJames Ball has written an illuminating piece on the recent UCAS statistics and reports which suggested that applications from wealthy students had dropped much more than those from poorer students. He adds some important context on precisely which applicants the data covers… Continue reading
TweetGraduate Fog do some straightforward digging to reveal that London Mayor Boris Johnson, who “attacked young jobseekers for lacking the “appetite” to find work”:
“Is busy recruiting for his own unpaid intern to help with his Back Boris 2012 campaign for re-election in May. His full-time “campaign assistant” will receive travel and lunch expenses only.”
The ad was found on political jobs website w4mp – but Graduate Fog add some further legal and historical context: Continue reading
TweetThe relaunched Police.uk crime website includes a new feature which allows you to find details of crimes near schools, universities and colleges.
Type in the name of an institution and you’ll get a map around that area. But if you want to see crimes specifically around that place zoom in and click on some numbers until you get one that says “On Or Near Further/Higher Educational Building” or similar.
The raw data (by force) is available in the upper right corner under the ‘data’ link.
More promisingly, there are plans to include arrest and sentencing data.
TweetUCAS have just released the latest statistics on university applications, generating a raft of stories on the impact of fees (a drop of 9.9% for English universities). If you want to dig further into UCAS data, you can download them from the UCAS datasets pages here, broken down by various categories such as age, ethnicity, educational background, and so on. The 2012 data isn’t available yet but there’s an example of how to scrape it here.
TweetThe Guardian’s Datablog has published data on secondary school league tables and exam results. It’s available in various formats:
TweetWhat better way to stay informed on education issues than having access to a database of national and local education correspondents?
All the correspondents can be found here. There’s also a Google Reader bundle of those and other feeds here.
The list of correspondents varies from the Independent Education Editor, Richard Gardner, to Andrew Denholm covering Scottish education. It also includes Graeme Paton of the Telegraph, Julie Henry (Telegraph), Laura Clark (Mailonline) and Mike Baker (BBC) amongst others.
RSS feeds are available to all the correspondents and this is a great resource to use if you are to stay updated about different areas in education. For investigative purposes, this data sheet shortens the length of time you may spend trying to locate information on a specific issue. Continue reading
TweetNew figures from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas) are expected to show a steep decline in the number of UK students applying to study in fall 2012, the Guardian reports. Continue reading
TweetA document that those following education should be watching. From the DfE site:
“Subject to the views of Parliament, these Codes will come into force on 1 February 2012, affecting the 2013/14 admissions intake. Continue reading
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Have a question you are dying to ask Education Secretary Michael Gove? MPs are asking you to tweet the question with the hashtag #AskGove. Continue reading
TweetThe National Audit Office (NAO) released a report last year which assessed the provision available to young adults who have special educational needs.
The report, which I wrote about in November, revealed a postcode lottery and wasteful spending. However none of the data collected was made publicly available, so I submitted a Freedom of Information request through What Do They Know? asking for a copy of the nationwide breakdown compiled by National Audit Office (NAO).
TweetA lengthy BBC report on accusations that academies are excluding pupils “unofficially” is worth reading through for insights into the school system and possible avenues of investigation that pre-date academies: Continue reading