Apprenticeship and training edtech company MWS Technology has created a brand-new interactive dashboard to make annual Department for Education (DfE) data accessible to UK apprenticeship providers, revolutionising DfE apprenticeship data with data analytics.
Named the Aptem Intelligence Dashboard (AID), the feature was created by Mark Abrahams, head of research and analytics and MWS. AID takes information from the DfE’s raw excel spreadsheets on UK apprenticeships and turns them into searchable, cross-correlatable data.
The feature is intuitive and easy to access, allowing apprenticeship providers, employers and researchers to identify useful trends in both local and national apprenticeships.
The function enables users to search for data on individual providers, standards/frameworks and local authority areas. They are currently able to compare 2017/17 data with data from 2018/19. New, comparable statistics will be added every year.
Searching by provider, users can identify the standards and frameworks offered by each one, along with the number of starts (overall and for each standard/framework), achievement rates, Ofsted results, the total number of learners and funding allocation.
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Searching by apprenticeship standard/framework, users can uncover who delivers what, as well as how many learners are enrolled on the programme.
On top of this, AID enables local and regional searches. Users can type in an area or multiple areas and find all the providers listed in that area, along with the number of starts. If users hover over the highlighted area on the map, it reveals general population and apprenticeship statistics. They can also access a bar chart showing the apprenticeship programmes and levels for that area.
“I had been analysing the significant amount of publicly available DfE data to help MWS colleagues and our partners in the apprenticeship sector. We decided to use Power BI so that everyone could quickly find and focus on the key information they needed. As this is public data, we elected to make it available on the Aptem website for everyone to use,” Abrahams explained.
“AID is the only example of an interactive mapping tool that reframes DfE apprenticeship data. AID is truly innovative and reflects MWS’s interest in the potential of big data and data analytics to transform the way we do training.
“AID is an evolving project, and we are adding new features and data sources as they become available. We would welcome input from users of our Dashboard for other data points they would like to see.”