What’s next for OpenSAFELY Schools?

In the next phase of the project, we’re focusing on getting OpenSAFELY Schools to an important milestone: having a solid, working pipeline that can run a full research project end-to-end, with minimal manual intervention. This builds on our existing walking skeleton and sets us up to grow OpenSAFELY Schools into a fuller service over time.

Our aim is twofold. First, we want researchers working with the TED data to immediately benefit from a more productive and reproducible way of working. Second, we want to make it easier to keep improving the platform, adding the technical and service features needed for wider use in the future.

We’re delivering this through three main strands of work:

First, improving the analytics pipeline

We’re working to remove the need for day-to-day human involvement in running analyses and viewing results inside the secure environment. Researchers will be able to run their code and see outputs in a controlled way, while final release of results will remain carefully checked. We’re designing this with long-term maintainability in mind, so it can be supported and extended over time.

Second, preparing the data

We’re making sure the data needed for an initial “teacher value-add” study is available, well-structured, and good enough to support meaningful analysis. This includes multiple years of data and coverage across different types of schools.

Third, setting out policy and governance

Alongside the technical work, we’re defining processes for outputs to be checked and released safely, and clarifying what additional legal, ethical, and regulatory requirements need to be met before the platform can be opened up more widely.

Together, these steps will put OpenSAFELY Schools on a much firmer footing, helping us move from an early MVP to a trusted, scalable way of doing secure and reproducible research with schools data.