School Closures – a better way?

What does this really mean, can some tell me? - Innovations like this need feedback and testing – and innovate.direct.gov.uk is where you can do it. If systems are very open, what drawbacks might they have? What would improve a service like this? How should we balance openness and reliability while still being useful?

And lo and behold - Local Directgov have already set up a new link straight to School Closure pages on LA websites. See the "School closures" link on the front page of Directgov.

LEA schools in Gloucestershire already have a website to show school closures. This runs throughout the year and shows details of any unplanned closure for any reason. Head Teachers dial in, through an interface with the GCC Solidus system, to a server using a password. The computer generates an automatic message for the media and automatically updates their closed schools website - http://www.glosclosedschools.co.uk. The system also bunches the e-mails and sends these to radio stations about every 5 mins.
This system has been runnng for some time and worked well under the pressure this week.

@Feargal Hogan
>Surrey have changed the URL for their status page.
Slightly better.

>And actually, the LEA have no responsibility for the private sector.
I know that, but most of the public don't, nor do they care, nor should they have to.

To them a school is a school is school.

Otherwise the url should be changed to publicsectorschoolclosures.org.uk. ;-|

This is exactly why you cannot trust this kind of national initiative to local athorities who for the most part are incapable of bridging the chasm between what they see as their own information silo, and what the public should reasonably expect from "school closures".

But in the defence of LEAs, whose money should they spend collecting information about the open/closed status of private schools?

Some data in the dataset published on the site somehow leapfrogged that chasm, because I saw Private schools on the map intemingled with public sector schools and went, Wow! At last, someone has understood. colour me impressed.

(Although I do reluctantly admit that for a time it may come to pass that private schools open/closed status will be something that is linked to rather than indicated - i.e. it wont be a green/red symbol but a link to the home page of the school - not as showy, but at least inclusive, and does what it says on the tin.

This was great but there was no date. I'm not sure if the information shown is for yesterday...

Surrey have changed the URL for their status page.

Helpful, aren't they.

Surrey CC, at least they made an attempt, but it illustrates exactly the mindset of LAs and therefore the need for schoolclosures.org.uk

1) Not a url to inspire confidence:
http://www.surreycc.gov.uk/sccwebsite/sccwspages.nsf/LookupWebPagesBy
TITLE_RTF/Status+of+schools+Wednesday+4+February?opendocument

Therefore not a scrape-able url, and in any case scraping should be consigned to the trash bin. (is it really such a technological leap from making a webpage to making an rss feed?)

2) Does not include private schools, nurseries etc.
My LEA Silo, *sigh*.

Thought the schoolsclosures site is a brilliant idea. A tool to give the information required at a glance.

I presume it is regulalry kept up to date during an event. Is there scope to state how long a school may be closed during an event. During a flood it might be necessary to close a school for a number of days and this would be known from the outset. This would avoid the need for people to check the website daily - reducing traffic to the site.

[...] Posted on February 4, 2009 by megov A message to govt/civil service/whitehall: You can do it! In direct response (obviously) to my plea yesterday, Direct.gov.uk launched [...]

Colour me very impressed! The addition of the map opens up more possibilities; why keep it simply to a school closures website? Having kids approaching a school age it would certainly be a useful tool to see what schools there actually are in my area that I could send them to, especially if I'm new to the area.

Again, opening up the information in an API would be beneficial for local authorities websites.

For us (Lincoln) and other districts in our area to be able to reproduce the map in our pages would be great. Not everyone may be aware of this website so a first port of call for information like this would certainly be local councils.

Good job and quick turnaround.

Excellent stuff - would have been really useful to plug in this widget to our site rather than trying to produce and coordinate lists of school closures in Word format.

Nice, slick and gets away from the "you need to know your LEA" style.

Couple of usability things;
If I enter letter o instead of integer 0 in a postcode, its not smart enough to automatically convert that for me, and on failure the submit button stays disabled so I cannot enter a second pcode.

Many ppl describe their pcode as BL"Oh" instead of BL"Zero".

So green marker on the map means school open? (couldnt find any closed schools) needs a key at least red=closed green=open.

Sorry if these are crass and obvious.

Ditto all the remarks re: rss, sms and twitter. Find a sponsor for a 30 character add in the sms if the price makes you balk, "Tesco computers for schools" or similar.

Ditto the remarks above about synication for district, town, parish councils, newspapers etc.
Offer all full and open syndication rights with all formats: REST, SOAP, JSON, JS, HTML etc

Get the urls right too, for direct links:

schoolclosures.org.uk/gu7-1hr/closed/2/map
ie show me within 2 mile radius of GU7 1HR all schools closed on the map

schoolclosures.org.uk/b27-2gr/
ie show me within 5 mile radius of GU7 1HR all schools closed as a list.

Individual schools by name
schoolclosures.org.uk/surrey/charterhouse

Individual schools by some id that those in the know will have somehow looked up or bookmarked.
schoolclosures.org.uk/23456

Great work.

ps when will this blog have its own rss feed, soon? Oh, and if there are no API/Rss feeds to the good stuff yet, can you say so?

With pre-school age children we are more interested in whether nursery schools are open or not in bad weather. We can find state school opening information from the County Council's website (although only in amongst other press releases, it seems).

Whether you can get all privately-run nurseries and pre-schools to add themeselves to the database, and keep their status updated, is another matter...

[...] saw the launch of a new site developed by Directgov. I’ve no idea what their intention is, other than to demonstrate their ability to build a [...]

Good to see something coming out of the Innovate team, particularly something that is so currently relevant. Fast work!

There are some comments on here questioning the relevance of this service; I think that this is not aimed simply at parents and schools, but also at local authorities and any other interested local groups. A good point of reference here is the work that MySocity have done with opening up API's to their data. This has given developers at relevant authorities the ability to quite easily integrate local data into their sites for public consumption.

As for keeping the data current as well as authenticating posts, could Posterous be a good model? Allow schools to register their email address; they can then send updates as to their closed status via email. This could be taken to another level, as suggested by Jenni T - sending a specific date in the subject line of the email could pre-schedule closures.

As for an end user, a useful feature for a parent would be the ability to sign up for SMS updates on their local school. RSS may be alien to some people, but the majority of the country, I'm sure, now use a mobile phone.

[...] Saturday they have already responded to this and have developed agreat resource (beta) for school closures information. If this is the kind of thing that will happen then we  must all learn from this approach and look [...]

@Simon
Is there a brandname on the front of the can of worms?

Authenticated updates <> not create more technological bureaucracy for schools to manage. The frontline staff in schools are generally (my apologies to them in advance) not very technologically advanced. Those nice ladies in the office who usually deal with grazed knees, who may well have a data-update role as well. The average small primary does not employ a fulltime IT technician.

So it needs to be simple - username/password login|change|save|logout. To most of them tweats are for birds.

I like that you're innovating and do-ing as a way of learning - rather than getting in some endless loop of proposals and procurement.

However, this strikes me as an idea that works best as a platform or service, rather than a destination. It needs to be infinitely re-usable - by radio station sites, schools sites, even as an alert system a parent can sign up to.

But to be really useful you'd have to address the school sites themselves - which are generally terrible and haven't the capacity to redisplay the data as necessary.

It's pretty rare that schools close at short notice (thankfully) so the level of investment required might not be worth the return - unless you could broaden the concept out as a way of aggregating / disseminating any emergency notice that is of interest to large groups of people.

So - it'd be good to continue with this build as a model, but keep it as open and reusable as possible and iterate over time.

I'm delighted to see the speed this is happening at, and delighted to see the use of open source / free tools (Drupal and FreeDNS). But let's not get carried away yet, folks: it's really only proof that we can import a data dump from Edubase into Drupal, and can enable user comments on each record.

There are two massive hurdles to get across: some kind of user authentication (to give Feargal's 'official' and 'unofficial' comments), and an outbound RSS feed for each node, to allow the information to be pumped into individual school websites, council websites, local (and national?) media websites.

The latter is relatively easily achieved, I guess; but the former opens up a family-size can of worms.

I'm not sure that the feedback is getting through from the site, so:

1. The school data is out of date (I know because the school my daughter goes to merged last year, and this isn't reflected in the school listings). You'd have to consider how to keep the school list up to date over time.

2. The frame-based design makes it hard to bookmark pages, but I guess you're just doing that because you weren't able to put it up properly at the schoolclosures.gov.uk domain? You should be looking to enable scrapers to reuse the information that's gathered here (eg on streetwire.com), so some kind of simple flag for open/closed/unknown for today and tomorrow would be useful (as well as more general comments).

3. Expand this to cover planned closures, such as inset days, and you have a site that could be useful year-round. Especially if you added an iCalendar feed for each school that people to import into their calendar apps.

4. I like the idea of it being crowd-sourced: you only need one teacher or parent to update the site, and others will benefit. The only problem is that because of that, it isn't an "official" source. What if someone updates it incorrectly (for whatever reason); will "it said the school was closed on schoolclosures.gov.uk" cut it as an excuse for missing school? You know we parents can be locked up if our children skive!? ;) If we have to look in an official place as well (or call the school) it doesn't end up saving us much work.

Fantastic to have something up so fast! Perhaps we'll need it at the end of the week too :)

What exactly is the purpose of the Web site? You clearly state what it isn't, but you don't say what it's for. I was unable to find my kids' school by searching for the name (obvious search term really). Furthermore, I was expecting to see an update on the school's status on open/closing - anything else is a static search box for schools which doesn't work.

I understand it's good to be innovative and do a little R&D - but you need to work out what your objective is before spending (even a small amount of) money on such projects.

Lovely work... all you need now is add a link to every school's website, and you'll be 90% of the way there!

Feargal - widgets/iframes could be an answer for school sites that don't have the ability to 'use' RSS feeds?

I really like this idea, although I think there are real difficulties in bringing all the data together.

One way to increase the likelihood of school personnel keeping the open/closed status up-to-date would be to feed it back by way of an RSS/Atom feed, so that they could reuse on their own site. That would close the loop. It would also allow local radio to then take a different feed from schoolclosures for their own purposes.

Much of that is predicated on the school website being able to 'use' RSS feeds which people like primarysite.net do not build in by default.

Interesting stuff, the only problem I can see is that the info isn't necessarily coming out of schools. If there isn't a blanket closure, then someone in the education dept of a council might not know that a particular school is closed. There needs to be a system for heads to either update it themselves or contact the council to let them know.