Targeting educational inequity

This project, for Right to Succeed, is an openly available set of online visualisations which aim to bring a new perspective to targeting and tackling educational inequity in England. The key focus is to bring together open data from various sources to build a picture of how parental income influences outcomes across age, theme and time.

For example, if by age 19 young people from poorer backgrounds are not achieving the expected level in mathematics in a particular geography then we want to be able to track this back to see at which age most of the divergence to their less disadvantaged peers occurred. We hope this will allow more nuanced targeting of interventions to ensure commissioning is as effective as possible and that strategies are not based on anecdotal perspectives of an area.

Illustrating Impact helped design the views and were the lead developer on the project. Technically the tool is a set of Tableau Public visualisations embedded in a WordPress web frame. The data source is a static, offline data model developed specifically for this project to allow the simple integration of data from several different sources. This data work was a challenging part of the project as over 30 different data sets needed to be brought together in a novel way. The resulting data source has several million records and includes data across three academic years.

The initial development of this tool was supported by pro-bono support from Deloitte and is funded with the support of Credit Suisse.

We plan to develop this tool by allowing trend analysis as well as specific views on the ‘Opportunity Areas’. Where appropriate we may begin to include school level information in to the views for users with a deep interest in particular areas.

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