Senior Data Analyst

A number of opportunities are available across the department, both in embedded analytical teams working on policy development in schools, skills and families, and in central teams supporting strategic priorities and projects.

On Any Given Day You Might Be

• Advising senior decision makers or Ministers on the evidence base in your area. Communicating complex concepts succinctly and persuasively to inform or influence decisions.
• Using cutting edge modelling techniques to get the best from our rich administrative data for analysis, forecasting, appraisal or funding allocations.
• Collating, validating, processing and publishing official statistics on high profile education topics.
• Developing innovative code or pipelines to automate processes, analysis or insight.
  
  

Examples of recent projects statisticians and operational researchers have been involved in include:

• Setting up new statistics on Children Missing Education and Elective Home Education to fill a major gap in the evidence base.
• Developing automated pipelines from a new daily data feed to provide award-winning insight at pace to Ministers, policy, schools and the sector on attendance levels in schools.
• Providing high profile briefing to Ministers on GCSE, A levels and T levels results days.
• Working with policy and ministers to develop new metrics to hold schools to account on their pupils’ attainment and progress.
• Projecting the expected primary and secondary pupil populations to 2032 to inform the need for future school places.
• Forecasting higher education student numbers, student loan outlay and student loan repayments, for use in financial planning and policy development.
• Using stock and flow modelling to understand the impact of policy reforms on children entering and leaving the social care system.
  
  

Examples of official statistics produced by DfE can be found on our excellent Explore Education Statistics service.

Roles will be allocated to successful applicants based on candidate background and preference, as well as business need.

While we are interested in all types of statisticians and operational researchers, we particularly welcome applicants with experience in:

• Coding and automation (R, SQL, Python preferable).
• Carrying out statistics/modelling analysis or reporting and disseminating it with impact.
• Approaching an analytical problem or understand customer requirements.