Spotlight: evaluating the need for open standards

This section outlines the role of standards in primary and secondary education

In most industrialised nations, primary and secondary education are heavily regulated sectors, and the UK is no exception. In England, some aspects are handled by local authorities, while the Department for Education (DfE) is responsible for others. In either case, however, the level of regulation means that the sector is in effect already highly standardised: informational requirements in matters such as admissions criteria, student exams, performance measures, and inspectorate reports are well-defined by existing legal and governmental directives.

The result is that questions of standardisation in education concern the technical formalisation and expression of existing informational requirements. This can make the task of defining a standard and determining the value of doing so simpler than it might be in some other areas, depending on the answers to a relatively constrained set of questions.

Who is the audience for the data described by the standard?

In the education sector, the audience will typically be some set of:

• Students

• Parents

• Teachers and other school staff

• School inspectors

• Governmental organisations, such as the DfE or local councils

Note that the kind and scooe of data expected by each audience may be different: parents and students will normally be focused on investigating two or three schools in-depth, while government departments may often be interested in aggregate data.

What problem does standardisation solve?

The answer to this question depends to some extent on audience. Some possible responses include:

• Comparability: Existing data may be collected haphazardly, in a variety of formats, or in incommensurate ways, making comparison meaningless for end-users. Providing a standard can help improve data quality here.

• Workflow: Providing standardised responses on eg webforms can improve data collector speed and reliability. This can result in substantially reduced costs and overheads, particularly where manual data curation and refinement is extensive.

• Reporting: For data to be reliably aggregated, it needs to be in some standardised form. A standards process can help with this.

• Data quality: Standardisation often leads directly to improved data quality, particularly where the information available is largely qualitative.

• Market disaggregation: The substantial IT infrastructure required for regulation and reporting has the potential to ‘lock in’ organisations to their existing platforms because migration costs are high. Open standards can help to create an alternative ecosystem where suppliers compete on price and features rather than ‘lock in’.

Answering the questions above will help form a picture of how valuable a standard may be; and doing so in sufficient detail to give a quantitative (pounds and pence) figure for value can be extremely helpful. While ascertaining a precise figure can be difficult, calculating the hours spent on eg data collection or cleaning can be done with some reliability – and even an answer giving a sense of magnitude can usefully inform the decision over whether pursuing standardisation is likely to be worthwhile or not.