It has been apparent for some time that there may be a structural decline in the content market in schools. However, there is one area that has remained buoyant over recent years – data.  This is demonstrated by the recent market interest in the acquisition of assessment provider Granada Learning – an acquisition that could have been seen as defensive by a publisher, but is seen as an opportunity by Investcorp.  Why is this?

Data is increasingly essential to the operation of schools.  Both assessment/ attainment data and management data are generated in ever increasing quantities, and both have the potential to drive school improvement.  It is used for accountability purposed through Ofsted; top communicate with parents and most importantly teachers use data to enhance the learning they deliver to pupils, for example in the assessment for learning process:

Data is essential to this cycle – curriculum data describing what should be taught; pupil data collecting data about the child and the school’s interaction with it and attainment data gathered from tests and teacher assessment.

Few schools make effective use of this data – it is often manually entered into spreadsheets and shared at particular points in the school year, and many teachers are not equipped to analyse it.  Therefore supporting school data use is a significant area of opportunity for the commercial sector – in terms of:

• Data acquisition – supporting schools in generating attainment and other data through assessment and from content tasks
• Data management – helping schools effectively to collect and share data
• Data analysis – Supporting schools in making the data useful to teachers in terms of supporting pupils, and identifying successes

Publishers have a significant opportunity to enhance their portfolios by using their content to generate useful data; and by developing systems to consolidate and analyse data.