What an eventful year 2020 has been, to say the least. As with everyone, Covid-19 challenged us to rethink the way we work and in March we said a temporary goodbye to our Clapham office and moved online. The significant changes in the education sector, one of our key markets, forced us to react quickly, adapting our support to meet the changing demand from schools, academy trusts and local authorities. However, over the year we’ve still launched new reports, developed our products, and expanded our user base. 2020 also gave us fantastic opportunities to work with several new clients on interesting and valuable projects. Read on to learn about some of the highlights from our year.
Report launches
- London’s Post-16 Trajectories Report for the GLA and London Councils – we launched the report with partners at the UCL Institute of Education, on a webinar with more than 100 attendees. The research tracks the post-16 pathways and outcomes of 355,000 young Londoners
- In the Mix with NCS Sub-Group Analysis Report for the National Citizenship Service – a sub-group analysis, jointly produced by Mime and Jump, of the programme’s impact on social mixing, cohesion and engagement
Some of our exciting new projects
- SH24 – developing their analysis for client areas and transforming internal data processes for this fantastic sexual health charity
- Girlguiding – analysis of the free text responses to their annual survey to draw out key themes
- Transparency International – updating and developing their corporate anti-corruption benchmarking tool
- Acas – developing an organisational data strategy to address gaps and set out a roadmap for Acas to get more value from data
- Wandle Teaching School Alliance – creating and developing phonics questionnaires and producing analysis of this for teachers
- Birmingham Local Authority – reviewing all funded school places for pupils with SEND and proposing options for significant cost savings
- Pearson – designing and prototyping pupil, school and trust-wide analysis of question-level data, including benchmarks
Following on from the successful launch of our inclusion index at the end of last year, we’ve been working with individual local authorities to help them better understand inclusion in their area:
- West Midlands Children’s Services – reviewing inclusion of young people with SEND across the region’s 14 local authorities
- Swindon Local Authority – developing qualitative and quantitative measures of inclusion across Swindon’s schools
Developing our existing services
- EYFS Tracker – we’ve built a new pilot site to support the new EYFS framework and launched this with early adopter schools across England
- SEND Dashboard and Infographic – we’ve made improvements to the Dashboard and Infographic and we’re now supporting more local authorities than ever across London and the South East
- Special School Tracker – we’ve on-boarded new users and developed the Tracker to meet new requirements
- Southwark Adult Learning Service – we continued our long-standing relationship, and supported them to move partners online to continue to allow vulnerable adults access to important provision during Covid-19
- Intelligent London – we’ve kept the website updated throughout the year, and made improvements to the Local Overview reports
- Results day analysis – we adapted our traditional results day service to provide more meaningful analysis for this year; comparing grades to centre assessed grades, to 2019 and to local authority averages to help local authority and school leaders understand the impact of these momentous changes
Mime blog highlights
- We analysed the latest data on SEND incidence and primary needs producing an interactive map showing SEND pupil incidence and need types across England and an exploration of the possible link between pupils with English as an additional language (EAL), and those with a primary need of Speech, Language, and Communication Needs (SLCN).
- We also looked into the 2020 Key Stage 4 attainment data, calculating the Attainment 8 disadvantage gap across state-funded schools in England, by region and local authority, and exploring whether this has been impacted by the 2020 grading system.
Supporting our community
- We remain committed to supporting vulnerable young people in gaining ‘real-life’ work experience, and have continued to work in partnership with a local special school and Spark! to provide these opportunities for young people with SEND. We were delighted to be able to host Mark for a week’s work experience – before the pandemic hit!
- We have also made a donation on behalf of our team to our local Norwood and Brixton foodbank
Looking forward
We’re hoping we’ll soon be able to return to our office, and then to meet our partners and clients in 3D! We’re also looking forward to developing our existing products, particularly growing our speciality in SEND pupils and inclusion. On that we’ll be developing an interactive SEND Dashboard, and making improvements to the Special School Tracker. We’ll also be completing our pilot of the new EYFS Tracker and supporting users as they transition to this from September 2021. Over the academic year we’ll hopefully be returning to some of our more business-as-usual school improvement analysis services, albeit still supporting schools and local authorities to adapt to new ways of working, however 2021 pans out. And, we will soon be sharing local authority specific insights from our post-16 trajectories report. We also hope to work with new and innovative partners across the public and charitable sectors, helping them make the most of their data to bring about positive social change.
We look forward to the new challenges and exciting projects that we’ll be working together on over 2021 and we wish you all a happy new year!
Get in touch if you would like to hear more about any of these projects or products.
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