I had a conversation a while ago with one of our users who said they were finding it difficult to compare state and independent secondary schools. So, after some thought, we came up with an innovative and completely unique solution to aid the process.

Whilst state schools (and some independents that are also inspected by Ofsted) have an overall inspection rating, independent schools which are mostly inspected by the Independent Schools Inspectorate (ISI) don't.

This got me thinking and whilst we can't magic an overall inspection rating out of thin air, we can make life a little easier for our users who are researching independent schools by extracting the key information from the ISI reports and showing it in our independent school popups.

We have for a long time provided highlights from Ofsted reports for state schools but again for independent schools this hasn't been available; we've provided links to all the ISI inspection reports but users have had to open up each ISI report and read through it to get a summary of each school's performance.

This got me thinking and whilst we can't magic an overall inspection rating out of thin air, we can make life a little easier for our users who are researching independent schools by extracting the key information from the ISI reports and showing it in our independent school popups.

We implemented this new feature in March and it is totally unique to us. It really makes a huge difference to the ease at which you can compare independent schools, especially when looking at them side-by-side for comparison using our shortlist feature.

This new feature is available for both primary and secondary independent schools and we have colour coded ratings to match the way we display Ofsted ratings. Below is an example of this in action:

Author: Lewis Tandy