The School Workforce Census – Opportunities for Analysis

Tuesday, 27 September 2011, 5pm, at the Royal Statistical Society


The first full collection of the School Workforce Census (SWF) took place in November 2010; the Department for Education subsequently published data from this new source in April 2011. The SWF has been designed to be a single, annual exercise that collects detailed individual level information on school workforce members. Schools and local authorities extract the data from their own management information systems and share this with the Department. This new census has been designed to replace several existing collections and has resulted in more complete data of higher quality on the school workforce.

Officials from the DfE will discuss the issues and challenges involved in moving to this single data collection. Discussion will then turn to analyses undertaken on the SWF census for policy development and the scope for the wider research and statistical community to use this data. In particular, we will present a discussion of the way the new data complement established sources such as Vactrack to answer questions on how many teachers should be trained and how much should be spent on programmes such as the National Professional Qualification for Headship.

Tanya McCormack (Department for Education)
Louise Skelton (Department for Education)
John Howson (DataforEducation.info)

Attendance is free but pre-registration is encouraged. Meeting contact: Charles Lound (charles.lound@ons.gov.uk). For a map and directions see www.rss.org.uk/findus. We expect the meeting will finish by 6:30pm.