Open data: Guardian Good GCSE Guide
The Open Public Services Network and the Guardian have created a guide that uses government data to help parents find and research local schools in England.
The Guardian Good GCSE Guide
Parents who want to choose a secondary school can use the Guardian Good GCSE Guide to research education in their area. Users can search by postcode to find which schools offer individual subjects, and compare how they have performed in GCSE exam results.
The guide uses publicly available results data from key stage exams and GCSEs, as well as pupil and school characteristics from the national pupil database and Ofsted inspection reports. Browse datasets from the Department for Education.
The guide launched in September 2013 and had 20,000 users on the first day alone.
The Open Public Services Network (OPSN) is a not-for-profit organisation based at the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce). It provides independent assessments of information designed to monitor and assess the performance of government and public services.
Roger Taylor, chair of the OPSN, said:
The data gives parents a clearer understanding of the differences between schools in terms of what they teach and the standards achieved, to help them understand the educational opportunities open to their children.
Our objective was to present publicly available data in a way that is easy to understand and directly address the questions that parents and pupils have. We will be building on this work in future by expanding the range of information that we can make available and updating it each year.
Get involved
If you’d like to see more great apps using open data or find out more about how they are made, visit www.data.gov.uk or tell us which of our unpublished datasets could bring economic or social benefits.
Use the search function to find data that’s important to you and click on the dataset to add your feedback.