During our research we are always trying to explore the reasons, motivations and rationales that lie behind why schools are not ‘doing’ data. On our last visit of the year, Brookdale’s ‘data lead’ teacher had some interesting thoughts on why schools do not need to turn to data analytics in the same way that other organisations might have to … in short, he reasoned that teachers already ‘know’ their students and are familiar with then in a way that most other organisations can never be:
“We know our customers … If you are Coca Cola then you need these data analytics because you don’t know your customers. Even then they don’t really know who their customers are – they are just looking for broad patterns in the data. But as a school *we* know who *our* customers are very well. So we don’t need any big data analytics. If anything we need ‘small data’ … if that’s a thing that I haven’t just made up.”