Developing and maintaining an inclusive and sustainable education and employment ecosystem plays an important role in the economic growth of local areas, and data is a core part of any effective modern ecosystem. West London Business and the West London Alliance have been working with stakeholders from across West London to understand how access to skills data could help to improve the responsiveness of skills provision within the region and ensure appropriate commissioning of education provision to support green skills and a transition to a zero carbon economy. They’ve identified the issues currently affecting how data is being accessed, used and shared across the West London education ecosystem, including:
- a lack of clear, openly available, timely and accurate data about the demand for skills, and at a sufficiently granular level of detail
- difficulty clearly identifying where specific gaps in skills provision lie, due to lack of available information
- a lack of data standards particularly around data about the supply side, for example general course profiles for Further Education courses, which makes it hard to compare and integrate similar datasets
- a lack of easy accessibility to supply side data, causing a larger manual working requirement for those wishing to use the data
As a first step towards addressing these issues and trying to identify opportunities to move forward in improving access to skills data for West London, the Open Data Institute (ODI) worked with West London Business, West London Alliance and partners to run a Data Ecosystem Mapping workshop. This report presents our key findings and recommendations. If you want to share feedback by email or would like to get in touch, contact the project lead James Maddison at [email protected].