One of the Department for Education’s (DfE) goals is to drive educational excellence everywhere – to ensure that every child and young person achieves to the best of his or her ability regardless of prior attainment, location or background.

A key enabler of this goal is the timely production of high quality data and information to stakeholders (e.g. schools, multi academy trusts, local authorities, OFSTED) to support school self-evaluation and improvement and tackle areas of underperformance.

The DfE currently enables local accountability and benchmarking through the provision of RAISEonline, the existing contract for which is due to expire in the near future.

Following engagement with the market and initial scoping of the various users of the current RAISEonline service, the DfE is now carrying out user research to gather evidence on the key users of performance data in the education sector, what their needs are, and what users of the current RAISEonline service find most and least valuable.

In parallel, the DfE wants to engage further with organisations on our current thinking on how the market can continue to provide innovative data services to schools, above and beyond a free core service.

In particular, the DfE wants to explore the pros and cons of introducing licensing arrangements to improve organisations’ access to data whilst maintaining or improving the level of confidentiality of pupil data.

See 'Attachments' for further information.