Andy writes on HE data and policy issues for a number of publications including Wonkhe and Research Professional.
He co-authored a chapter on data capability for a book titled Higher Education Strategy and Planning (Routledge, 2017).
Below are a number of short blogs on data, jazz and other things that are close to Andy’s heart.
If you would like to discuss a writing commission, please get in touch.
There’s something magical about the coastline; that place where the mountains meet the sea, where the constant battle between the strength of the rocks and greatest forces of the sea play out with spectacular results. In 2017 I celebrated 30 years of working with data. A lot has changed in the world of data over…
Do you use a spreadsheet? Of course you do; who doesn’t? Spreadsheets, along with word processors, were the two “killer apps” that drove the rise of the Personal Computer (PC) as processing power moved out of the server room and arrived on desktops across the world. Before computers, spreadsheets were sheets of paper – usually…
We think a lot about data quality; why it matters, how we can achieve it and why it is sometimes very difficult to evaluate. When I first joined HESA in 1996 my job was Data Quality Manager and I was tasked with improving the HE sector’s understanding of, and approach to, data quality in the…
Every few weeks I hook up with some like-minded musicians to play jazz. Over the years I have played all sorts of music; from punk and reggae to pop, classical and shows. But I keep coming back to jazz. For me, jazz is a great metaphor for life and there are many lessons I take…
If you want to smooth the flow of data between systems, reduce cost and complexity, get better information out….and a myriad of other benefits….you need to standardise your data. It’s blindingly obvious – why have a dozen different ways of representing the same thing … and then have to deal with mappings and mismatches and…
The creep of spreadsheets into areas that were previously the domain of ‘proper’ system developments is a big cause for concern. I have written before about the myriad of ways in which spreadsheets – specifically the poor use of spreadsheets – causes problems. But there is more to get off my chest on this topic,…
Algorithms have been in the news a lot recently, most notably with the problems around the award of grades for school and college qualifications in 2020. This has not been a happy episode and the increasing public awareness of algorithms has been tainted by some hysterical headlines in the media and some fatuous comments from…
It’s strange how the prolonged use of language can diminish the value of words and leave us reaching for ever-higher superlatives. People are no longer ‘great’ they are ‘awesome’; ‘genius’ is a word that is now routinely used to describe people of no discernible merit. When I started my first ‘proper’ job in 1987 I…
Much of my work in the past decade has been pursuing the standardisation and rationalisation of data flows in education. Although my work has focussed on higher education, the basic tenets apply to schools and further education as well. The desire to standardise our data definitions is driven by a broader vision where data can…
The recent A-levels fiasco has shone a very bright light on the use of computer algorithms in policy and operations. While the Prime Minister’s fatuous comments about mutant algorithms has drawn a lot of media attention, the experience of this cohort of students raises fundamental questions about the way we process and analyse data and…