Making Sense of the Data
Making Sense of the Data

Making Sense of the Data

  1. You’ve been pushed in at the deep end and asked to lead data. It is time to sharpen your data axe.
  2. You are preparing for leadership interviews and expect another data task – what does this data show you?
  3. You sit opposite a colleague who is bilingual, speaking both education and data. You are just looking for a way into the conversation.

I know how you feel. Two years ago I was pushed into the deep end, no life guard on duty. I was not fully prepared for my first really challenging Raiseonline Assistant Head interview task. But, I was fortunate enough to share an office with a newly appointed Deputy Head, a fluent data speaker he was generous with his time. As school improvement become a professional focus, so making sense of the data, became a requirement. Where I could I read, explored and used data, I signed up to the Senior Leadership pathways ‘Data for school improvement’ module and attended data workshops and conferences and most importantly used data to lead school improvement in my new roles and wrote up my successes and failures #data.

This summer presented an opportunity to collect those thoughts and experiences, and seek contributions from other collaborative data leaders. The end results is a document ‘Making Sense of Data’ left in perpetual final draft.

Education is awash with data. Schools are awash with data. Ofsted, the DfE and local authorities more often than not, base their judgments about schools upon the messages they derive from school data. Governors are expected to use data to purposefully steer schools. Head teachers and Principals are held accountable by that data, and together with their senior and middle leadership teams, are expected to decisively lead their schools. Teachers are expected to intelligently use data to inform their teaching and raise student attainment. Parents and carers, to varying degrees, engage with that school and their childs data.

Who is it for?

Those out of their data depth, those aiming for a seat on the leadership team, those preparing themselves to lead on data or quite simply the data curious.

The document is only guide, designed to help clarify some of the questions you might encounter when trying to make sense of the data. A document designed to enable aspiring and established school leaders, enable educators to purposefully, decisively and intelligently, make the most of data.

If you are looking for advice as a school leader on how to interpret and respond to data, to explain the data within RAISEonline which Ofsted will use. If you are looking to explore how this data can be interpreted for the purpose of self-evaluation, to discuss how messages relating to data can be communicated to the wider school community or advice on how to develop a strategic approach to the use of data, then that is quite simply ASCL’s One day conference Leadership of data.

Contributions and corrections welcomed. Last updated 27.05.14 Version 0.9.6

Making Sense of Data by Kristian Still is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

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