News and Events

DLC Project Update: 08 Feb 2024

Data Professionals Survey

Rob has launched the data professionals survey. The purpose of this survey is to gain insights from education data professionals into the current context, challenges and opportunities they are facing regarding data skills, roles, careers pathways and qualifications. 

We have already had over 200 responses, which is amazing, but we want more! The survey is still open and doesn’t close until 16 February, meaning that there is still time to complete this if you haven’t done so already, and better still, share it with your data colleagues. 

Rob has produced an interim report, exploring some of the initial findings from the survey. He has also led our first Focus Group, connecting data professionals from across the sector in order to share ideas and understand their experiences, career paths and challenges in more detail.

Data Skills Frameworks

Lizzie has conducted a review of data related job adverts and descriptions. The purpose of this exercise is to explore ideas around what schools and trusts ‘think’ they need when recruiting a new data professional for their organisation. 

Lizzie has used this research to map out the most common areas of  knowledge, skills and experience that schools or trusts are listing as essential or desirable criteria for the role in question.  

The next stage in this process will be to compare and contrast the key findings from this with the results from the data professionals survey.  This will help us to identify any gaps between what we think we need and what data professionals are telling us  they ‘actually’ do.

Data Maturity Models

Tina has been busy meeting with a number of providers to look into the adoption of a data maturity model for the education sector. This includes investigating whether or not existing approaches from other sectors could be used or adapted for our context.

The next stage of this process will be to run a pilot study to review the feasibility of several different maturity models. This will help us to better understand if any of these would be of benefit to the sector, or if a new model should be developed.  

Tina will be giving a keynote speech at the ASCL Spring Data Leaders Conference on Tuesday 27 February in Manchester, under the heading: Do we have the talent we need in our sector to make the most of our data? Insights from the Data Leaders Collective.