Two trust bosses have teamed up to develop their own artificial intelligence (AI) platform to solve the “challenge of data fragmentation” in schools.
Open Education AI (OEAI) plans to bring assessment, behaviour, attendance, safeguarding, staffing and operations information into dashboards that automatically update ready for analysis.
Academy chains have already used it to predict which children are most likely to miss class and face safeguarding risks.
‘Leveller’
Lauren Thorpe, OEAI’s executive chair, said the tool was “a mechanism to enable trusts who haven’t got a lot of technical expertise off the shelf to have…an environment where they’ve got all the data organised pretty much automatically.
“It’s a leveller. We can draw better insights from the data if we can bring it into our own environment.”
Thorpe, the chief transformation officer of United Learning, England’s largest trust, worked with Matthew Woodruff, an AI company director and chair of the Kite Academy Trust, to create OEAI in 2023.
It has now been formally launched as a “sector-led non-profit” , with support to expand from the charity Purposeful Ventures.
The pair banded together after noticing the amount of time school staff spent trying to compare their schools’ data on different platforms.
Thorpe said OEAI was able to draw data from 30 edtech companies, with all the management information system (MIS) providers.
“Obviously, there are thousands of edtech apps, so this is very early days.”
She said it could “level the playing field for all schools and trusts” and enable them to make better sense of the myriad of data that underpins their work.
The tool is used by more than 30 trusts running more than 600 schools. It allows them to bring their data from various platforms into one place where it is stored, accessed and standardised before it is used for analysis.
Trust predictions
One trust has used OEAI to create a predictive attendance tool showing the pupils at risk of being absent. This helped inform its school preventive action.
Another academy chain is using it to anticipate which children are most vulnerable to safeguarding risks, based on their school results and local crime data.
Sir Jon Coles, United’s chief executive, said his organisation had used OEAI to build it own “data product, United Analytics, which allows us both to take advantage of others’ developments and share our own”.
Groups that are part of OEAI can also access analytical tools that can be customised and developed with other educators. It is currently free, but a subscription fee is expected to be introduced.
Shireland Collegiate Academy Trust has also partnered with OEAI. Sir Mark Grundy, its chief executive, said the “model of shared development of tools is such a refreshing change”.
“There are so many schools who can benefit from this, whether they are already using data insights widely or not.”
Access to researchers
OEAI also wants to allow researchers to “securely and anonymously access larger datasets”. It hopes this will “unlock system-level insights with greater accuracy and lower cost”.
This comes after Schools Week revealed the government wants school management information systems (MIS) providers to help it “harness the potential” of the real-time data they collect to inform policy decisions.
Ministers believe the scheme could help heads benchmark their schools with others across the country and contribute to government decision-making much quicker.
Among the data MIS providers collect are figures for attendance, payroll, admissions, behaviour and assessments.
