Our friends at BERG launched Schooloscope this week. It’s a lovely piece of work, sweeping up all sorts of impenetrable data about schools and making it glanceable, readable and accessible. You can tell they’ve really worked hard on the details and, having glanced over their shoulders a little while they’ve been making it, we can attest to how they’ve worked to turn inherently judgmental and binary data into something fair and nuanced. Schooloscope’s perspective is that of someone neutral and informed, it’s therefore a brilliant tool for comparing schools, for exploring a terrain that’s completely baffling to many parents. It’s a superbly intelligent platform for data.
If you’re already connected to a school though, the portrait they offer of your school probably won’t feel adequate. Deliberately neutral government data will never do justice to what someone involved with a school feels about that particular school. All of which struck me because we’ve just printed a newspaper for All Souls School in Westminster – an unashamedly un-neutral paper celebrating all that’s good about the school – aimed at recruiting more kids and parents.
It’s a lovely piece of work and made me realise that Newspaper Club is a platform too and perhaps an especially good platform for people with particular points of view. (More pictures)
And, it should be noted, both platforms are supported by 4iP.