Four sister dailies have published their third annual guide to the best schools on their patches.
Trinity Mirror has launched its Real Schools Guide for 2015, which takes into account 25 different data sets including GCSE results as well as factors like value-added scores, pupil-teacher ratios and truancy rates.
The guide, which is complied by the company’s central data unit and is tailored to each area, was published in the Birmingham Mail, Coventry Telegraph, South Wales Echo and Western Mail on Saturday.
Supplements will be published in the Liverpool Echo, Manchester Evening News, Newcastle Chronicle, Daily Post, Evening Gazette, Huddersfield Examiner, Aldershot News and Mail, Surrey Advertiser, Buckinghamshire Advertiser and Examiner series, and getwestlondon later in August.
The Birmingham Mail’s version of the guide
It is published as a print product, but parents can also go online to browse the full data, compare different schools, and find links to contact details and recent Ofsted reports.
Former schools minister David Laws described the inaugural 2013 guide as, “public-service journalism in the best tradition”.
David Ottewell, head of Trinity Mirror’s data unit, “The guide has proved enormously popular with parents in the years since it was first launched.
“But we haven’t stood still. Readers can get more information than ever about schools in their region using the online version of the guide.
“I believe it remains a unique and valuable resource, which proves how publicly available data can be harnessed it a way that is of real and enduring value our audiences.”
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We publish these guides using data which is already available to any conscientious parent out there with enough wherewithal to want to find it.
We’ve been doing this for many years in the belief that we’re delivering quality and insightful information to families about their choice of school. That used to be the case before the internet.
The truth of the matter is that we can cajole a couple of wealthy private schools into taking out premium rate advertising throughout the guide and make a few grand out of it by convincing them that a 16-page pull-out inside a paper that sells fewer copies than the population of a village on the outskirts of our patch is still the definitive guide to education for the region.
As my teacher husband says: “80 per cent of your decision about where your child goes to school is down to geography, not personal choice”.
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Slate Grey is right. These supplements were the print forerunner of clickbait.
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Slate,
Going by this and previous posts it looks like you are a Trinity Mirror employee – out of interest what is the feedback loop like inside TM?
There seems to be a consistency of concern, and I am surprised this has not filtered upwards and been acted upon!
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RT – TM has a long history of acting as though they are willing to listen to the lower ranks, but doing things the way they think is best in the end. Slate.
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Three quick points:
1. The Real Schools Guide only covers state-funded schools, so I don’t know why any ‘wealthy private schools’ would be interested in sponsoring it.
In any case,
2. There are NO adverts in the Birmingham version of the Real School Guide this year. It has never been a product that we want to be advert-heavy, but rather a ‘prestige’ product.
And
3. The whole POINT of the guide is that it uses information that is publicly available, and which therefore parents could indeed find. 25 different datasets, in fact. But wouldn’t it be helpful if all this data was in one place? And contextualised so you could tell whether one school was better or worse than another in different ways, at a glance? Rather than have to go to 25 different places to dig out 25 different datasets to compare two schools you might be interested in?
Criticise the product – fine. I’m happy to have that debate. I think it’s brilliant, actually; much more ambitious than any other schools guide, and a really good example of a team like mine helping people ‘fish’ in a huge and potentially overwhelming sea of data.
But in any case at least let’s check our facts first, eh?
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So we don’t carry any revenue streams on these products at all?
Then I must be mistaken. I stand corrected.
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No worries. I think there are ads in some versions of the guide (i.e. in other parts of the country), but not in the Birmingham version. And even in other places, not for schools that feature in the guide. Rather, for companies/organisations – such as HE or FE colleges – who you might expect to advertise in a unique guide to local schools. It is also seen as a sales driver (which it certainly has been), and something which drives significant traffic online – both when the guide is published and indeed throughout the year. Finally, there is the ‘providing a service’ aspect. It is an attempt to tell our readers something important about their local communities and resources; something we _should_ be doing, surely, and the absolute opposite of ‘clickbait’?
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Slate Grey – people can listen to you without agreeing with you, can’t they?
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It’s simple really…the best schools are in the poshest areas (that’s where house prices are highest).
You don’t need to “contextualise” anything.
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Fact Checker – NO.
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Looks like David Ottewell listened to you, then corrected you, surely?
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Fact checker – You see what you see. I know what I know.
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I know from experience that these add little or nothing to the sale of each title, regardless of how well they are pre promoted. So while they may be of interest to some, without advertising or a substantial benefit in NS revenue, they are unfortunately of little use to the host title
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Wouldn’t it be ‘The Real Schools’ Guide’? So you insert an apostrophe at the end of ‘school’.
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