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Visualising school performance in Microsoft Power BI
It’s easy to get hold of schools performance data about schools in England - data is available for download from the Department for Education website. This post uses the latest end of Key Stage data - the provisional dataset for 2016/17. You can find it here.
What’s the best way to visualise school performance data with Power BI? What is the best way to give the non expert - someone who doesn’t know too much about schools and statistics - an overview of school performance in their home town?
Looking for insights - Pearson Correlation and measures in Microsoft Power BI
The scatter chart in the last Power BI blog post is nice but it doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the relationship between % free school meals and GCSE performance at the end of Key Stage 4.
It seemed like a next step might be to calculate the Pearson correlation coefficient for the GCSE results/free school meals data.
Scatter Plots, School Performance and Microsoft Power BI
A scatter chart in Microsoft Power BI a great way to the relationship between two values. You plot 2 sets of numbers as a series of xy points and then look for patterns in the data - trends, clusters and outliers.
The scatter chart below is a good example. The data, downloaded from the Department for Education website, is about school performance in 2015/16. It shows the percentage of pupils getting 5 grades A* to C (including English and Maths) at each school together with the percentage of pupils at the school who get free school meals. The source spreadsheet contains a lot of other useful data about schools including location - town, local authority and region.
Power BI Cumulative Totals Measure - Visualising the Course Sales Pipeline
This is one way you can use the cumulative sales total measure I described in the previous post. I’ve used a bar chart visual to show how the total value of course enquiries, enrolments and lost opportunities change over time.
This is the DAX for the course enquiries version of the measure and my breakdown of how it works is here:
Power BI Cumulative Totals and Measures - Course Sales Pipeline
This is a nice example of how to create a measure in Power BI to calculate running or cumulative totals. It’s a refinement of a post I did on the SkillsLogic blog about using calculated columns to calculate running totals. In this example I’ve gone a step further used a measure - so the running totals change when the user applies filters to the report.
What is Progress 8 and how is it calculated?
Progress 8 is a new way of measuring secondary school performance in England. It was introduced in 2016 and it aims to capture the progress a student makes between the end of primary school and the end of secondary school.
Progress 8 scores are calculated for each individual student and then averaged across the the school to get a single Progress 8 score for the school.