About

OpenSAFELY is an award-winning digital platform that helps researchers analyse large, sensitive datasets, safely and securely. So far, it's been used solely with NHS health records.

OpenSAFELY Schools applies the same thinking to data from the education sector.

The project is a collaboration between the National Institute of Teaching (NIoT) and the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science, creators of OpenSAFELY.

Research collaborators are from Evidence Based Education, the Institute of Education at the UCL, and Faculty AI.

Funding for the initial 2-year proof of concept has been generously provided by XTX Markets and the Nuffield Foundation.

The research context

The primary goal of this project is to improve children's educational experiences.

In qualitative educational research, the most influential factor is how teaching is delivered. While there have been significant studies in this area, most of the research comes from the United States. Key findings to date include:

• Small group learning is linked to improved English attainment
• Teachers improve rapidly early in their careers
• Teachers who continue to improve later in their careers are often in schools with a strong supportive culture

Because most recent research is based on data from the US, it's not clear whether these findings apply in England. Despite the vast amount of data available in English schools, many teachers do not have the tools or support to interpret it effectively.

For researchers, access to school data is limited by technical barriers, a lack of standardised formats, concerns over data governance, and the risk of data being used for performance management rather than research.

We think OpenSAFELY Schools will be useful for finding answers to questions like:

• Does scheduling maths lessons in the afternoon improve performance?
• What impact does assigning the best teachers to lower ability maths groups have on overall outcomes?

In the longer term, we'd like OpenSAFELY Schools to position the UK as a global leader in educational research. We'd like to develop the largest and most advanced database for teacher training worldwide. We also aim to improve education research infrastructure through:

• Standardising open and reproducible research practices
• Enhancing code reuse across studies
• Ensuring privacy standards are maintained

The data we're working with

Many English schools are managed by trusts, and sometimes a single trust manages several schools - in which case, it's known as a Multi Academy Trust (MAT).

NIoT was founded in 2021 by four large MATs that share standardised systems, creating a dataset covering 170 schools, 6,500 teachers, and 115,000 pupils. Access to such large, standardised datasets in education is rare - access to this particular dataset represents a valuable opportunity to conduct research in a UK setting, reducing the need to rely on US-centric research.

Privacy is essential. We cannot disclose data about individual pupils or teachers, as a consequence of doing research. OpenSAFELY was designed to work on highly sensitive data from healthcare, making it open for research, but safe for patient privacy. OpenSAFELY Schools will work in the same way.

This website

The project team will use this website to post regular updates and insights.

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