Application Series 14

BACK TO SCHOOL FOR SIR

UK's Department for Education entrust their annual national Performance Tables to SIR and are impressed with the result.

Background

UK's Department for Education produced a Parent's Charter in 1991 in which they promised to publish annually 'Performance Tables' for all local schools. These tables were first produced in 1992 and have been published annually ever since and produce one of the Departments largest annual publication exercises.

The task is demanding not only because of the large amount of data that must be collected, checked and analysed, but also because of the short time period available to perform this large task. The highly political nature of these tables, which generally find themselves the subject of substantial media attention, means that they must be 100% accurate as well.

Recently the Department has entrusted the complete task of production of School Performance Tables to Forvus, SIR's UK distributor and are very pleased with the results.

The Performance Tables

There are 109 Local Education Authority Secondary Schools Tables and twenty-three Regional Tables, detailing the performance of over 5,700 schools and colleges. The main tables analyse school examination results (A level results and GCSE) for high school students in England. A further set of tables analyse student absences. The task at hand is to collect the information from various sources, check its accuracy, analyse the data and publish the resulting analysis.

This involves a variety of tasks. Administrative tasks need to keep track of the masses of data and ensure they have passed through all appropriate processes. Collection and editing tasks, need to easily find and update a single datum in this large collection. Reporting tasks need to enable progress to be frequently monitored. Analysis and tabulation tasks need the ability to quickly process volumes of data. All of these tasks need to be performed in a minimum amount of time. Fortunately SIR does all of these tasks particularly well.

School Examination Results

For the 1994 year, 808,669 A level results were processed for 295,383 candidates and 4,773,587 GCSE results were processed for 812,299 candidates. These data were collected from the eight examination boards within England and were provided by Bath University. Each result had to be sent to the relevant school for checking, along with Subject and School summaries. 100,000 pages of listings were sent to 5,700 schools and colleges within days of receipt of the data.

A record had to be kept of all communications with the schools (2,500 phone calls alone in a two week period), the resulting amendments (over 50,000 in all) and the reasons for these amendments. All of this work had to be completed in a little over a month to satisfy the DFE deadlines.

Authorised and Unauthorised absences

Survey forms were sent to 26,500 English schools to collect information on student absence, both authorised and unauthorised, and taught time. In order to achieve a creditable 94% response rate, records of the status of each of these survey forms and the actions taken so far was required, along with a record of all communications with the schools (including 3,500 phone calls and 5,200 follow up letters). Along with this task, the data from these forms had to be entered, edited and corrected.

How it was done

A SIR database system was set up on a Novell network fileserver. Up to 10 data entry stations concurrently updated the database, which grew to over one gigabyte in size, whilst additional stations performed administrative and other tasks.

SIR's concurrent interactive data entry systems, MFORMS + MDBMS, were used for the entering and correction of data. Secondary indexes made it easy to find a particular datum from a variety of different methods. Automatic record updating made it easy to keep track of what amendments were made, when and for what reason.

SIR's full report generator enabled a variety of different reports to be produced on demand to effect timely and efficient administration of the job. Ad-hoc questions were satisfied with SIR's quick report writer, SQL or SIR/EASY.

SIR's FREQUENCIES, TABULATION and REPORT procedures were able to provide accurate and thorough analysis of the massive data and produce the results in tabular format and csv files.

SIR's fourth generation language PQL cemented all of these tasks together and made what would have otherwise been a nightmare into a cohesive and manageable project.

The Results

The 1994 tables showed that 56% of schools have increased the percentage of their 15 year olds getting at least five GCSE grades A-C from the previous year. Over a quarter of schools increased this percentage from 1992 to 1993 and again from 1993 to 1994. The average point score per candidate getting two or more GCE A/AS levels has risen from 14.7 in 1993 to 15.3 in 1994.

Because of the publication of the tables parents, pupils, employers and the wider community have access to continuous reporting on the performance of educational institutions. The Education Secretary, Mrs Gillian Shephard, described the tables as a 'national treasure trove' of information. She said 'This database provides facts to help informed decisions and judgements to be made. The Parent's Charter principle of publishing comparative performance tables, and the important role they play in informing choice and helping raise standards, is now firmly established'.

For more information on the use of SIR in the DFE's Performance Tables contact:

Kathy Brooks
Director,
Forvus
53 Clapham Common South Side,
London SW4 9BX UK

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