The Good Schools Guide is looking for a statistician to help them extract useful information from UK schools data.
We have access, under the Freedom of Information Act, to vast databases of examination results and related information. We need help in two areas:
Firstly, it is our aim to produce information about individual schools, to aid parents in asking the right questions when they come to consider a school for their children. If you look at our web site, www.goodschoolsguide.co.uk, and navigate to the page for any English state mainstream secondary school, you will see how far we have got to date. What we have done is useful, but we think we can do more, and do it better, with professional advice.
We would expect to undertake the majority of the data processing involved; we would be looking for your help in deciding what useful information could be extracted, and how it could best be displayed.
Secondly, we are interested in exploring the data to see what information can be gleaned from it about the performance of UK schools as a whole, or of subsections or aspects of them. This is something quite close to standard academic work, and we would expect that publishable papers would result from it (and, indeed, publicity of a more general sort, with which we would wish to be jointly involved).
This is a far from a full-time post, but there are few deadlines, and the work should be something which you can fit into the interstices of your life.
You will need to have or have access to your own hardware and software, and it will need to be good: - files are in the gigabyte range, will tens of millions of records, and there are lots of them.
Ralph Lucas
Editor
The Good Schools Guide
3 Craven Mews, London SW11 5PW
Email: [log in to unmask]
Tel: +44 (0)20 7801 0191
Fax: +44 (0)870 052 4067
www.goodschoolsguide.co.uk
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