The Education Open Data Challenge was a part of The Open Data Challenge Prize Series, which was a series of seven challenge prizes to generate innovative and sustainable open data solutions to social challenges. It was funded by the Technology Strategy Board,(now known as Innovate UK) and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, now known as the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS), Haringey Council and the Department for Education.
The Challenge posed the following questions, which it incentivised innovators to solve:
How can we use open data to help parents make informed choices about their children’s education in one (or more) of three areas:
Open data has the potential to power tools that provide solutions to real problems. Although the UK is the world leader in releasing open data, its use in informing real world solutions has been limited and fragmented, with innovative start-ups lacking support and data expertise to scale to a sustainable business level.
This series of challenges aimed to galvanise a new community to use open data as the key ingredient in helping solve social problems. The challenges helped SMEs and start-ups to work with data providers, industry experts and business leaders to develop new ways to reuse available data, creating sustainable business opportunities.
Skills Route is a personalised service to help young people see how well they could do on courses they might take at local schools or colleges, and weigh up their higher education and career options.
Skills Route is unlike any of its competitors because it provides a personal service for young people. It brings together likely performance, subsequent learning pathways and long-term earning potential.
Illustreets for Education is an intelligent engine that creates tailored school recommendations based on a child’s characteristics and past performance.
PiC (previously know as In Context Brenda) from Upreach enables recruiters to make more informed decisions by understanding their candidates’ performance in context.
The platform promotes the full range of educational options available after GCSEs, and offers young people information to make the best possible choices. This will stimulate greater accountability amongst educational providers and encourage greater competition and better services in the future.
Schools have a statutory duty to provide impartial careers advice and guidance to support their young people using post-16 portals. Skills Route is well-placed to take advantage of this growing market.
An evaluation of the ODCS undertaken by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) found that for every pound spent on the ODCS there was likely to be a return to the economy of between £5-£10 after three years. The aggregated economic impacts for the three finalists in the Education Challenge suggested that the potential benefits by year three of this challenge, assuming no business failures, would be between: 7 to 17 jobs; £487,200 to £848,000 Gross Value Added (GVA) (in Net Present Value (NPV) terms); and, £29.4m to £51.4m social impacts (in NPV terms).
