danielheaf.com: 4iP's Schooloscope launches public beta

Last December 4iP announced it’s investment in a product provisionally named School Report Card. Late last week, the product now known as Schooloscope, quietly slipped into public beta.

Schoolscope's helps parents make better school choices for their children. As any parent knows choosing the right school for your child is one of the most important decisions you'll ever make and one you can spend hours researching and agonising over.

It's still early days with much work still to do but I thought I'd highlight some of the ways Schooloscope better serves parents' needs than the old style government league tables, books and documents.

1) It’s easy to understand.

Schooloscope turns baffling numeric league tables and hard to find PDF reports into a simple one page summary for 20,000 state schools. There are plans to expand to other types of schools later on.

Schooloscope is simple and easy to read. But don't be fooled, simplicity is one of the hardest things to achieve in web products. Knowing what to leave out and what to leave in makes or breaks products like this. Deep in the technical bowls of Schooloscope there are literally thousands of data fields ready to be activated should user feedback suggest a change.

As I've mentioned before I'm a firm believer that products should never be produced in isolation or drawn from untested founders 'visions'. The Schoolscope team went to great lengths to talk to teachers, inspectors, parents to understand their needs. What separates them from other teams I've worked with was they were genuinely prepared to let go of long held assumptions and sometimes designs to deliver a product that meets genuine user needs.

But the real genius and simplicity of this product is in it’s language. Sadly this is an area often overlooked by technical / internety folk. Each school is described in straightforward, natural English. If a school has unhappy pupils it says so. If the kids are doing well in exams it says so. Schooloscope reads between the lines of government reports telling you what the school inspectors have to hide in jargon and double speak for years.

The Good

The Not So Good

2) It’s brings lots of information together

Previously if you wanted to find information about your local schools you’d have a tough job collating it all and an even tougher job cross-referencing it and making sense of it.

This first version of Schooloscope brings together multiple reports over multiple years from both the OFSTED and DCFS website. It pulls out the most useful pieces of information, sometimes combining them in new ways to give a unique and consistent way to understand a schools.

While still in it’s infancy Schooloscope allows for basic geographic comparisons too.

3) It’s beautiful, fun and brimming with personality

It's sad that websites with a clear public purpose or public value are often so dull. Schooloscope bucks that trend! If the kids are happy the schools have a happy face. If the school has lots of pupils the buildings are larger etc etc. In my mind, there’s no question it’s a league above anything the public (e.g OFSTED) or private (e.g. Times Online) sector has produced.

This leads me on to another point relating to government data and transparency. As you’d expect I’m an strong supporter of policies that lead to the publishing of public data to ensure governments are increasingly accountable for it’s decisions and spend.

However, I find it harder to believe that there’s enough socially motivated developers and product managers out there in the UK to make all these new data sources as useful and empowering for your average citizen as they should be.

It’s not that I doubt ‘the crowd’s’ ability to tackle complex problems but I do question their ability to deliver beautiful products with a high degree of finish. Linux is technically a superior operating system but you’d be hard pushed to make the argument that it’s as beautiful as OSX or as palatable to the mainstream as Windows 7.

Naturally, this begs the question who is going to fund the development of these products. In this case 4iP has put up the risk capital. We see this as a product that could have enormous social value while simultaneously standing a good chance of becoming commercially viable in it’s own right. But in other cases the economic value may be less clear and so unlikely to attract typical venture finance. It has long been my opinion that to leave this role solely in the hands of non-profits and social ventures diminishes the chances of success.

Other People Talking About Schooloscope