Data and research policy

1. Editorial datasets are not survey research

Our current downloadable datasets are compiled from the school’s own editorial course, career-route and planning content. They are labelled as editorial, carry a version or verification date, and link to official starting pages where applicable.

They must not be read as employment statistics, salary surveys, population averages, official occupation registers or admission guarantees. We will not turn a planning band or internal catalogue count into a claim about what most students or employers do.

2. No research claim without first-party evidence

We will not publish reports about student outcomes, assessment patterns, counselling results, school cohorts, salaries or career transitions as original research unless the underlying responses or records were collected for that purpose, the method is documented and the limitations are visible.

Until that happens, a report is marked not collected rather than filled with estimates, scraped anecdotes or invented numbers.

3. If we begin collecting responses

1. Explain the purpose, fields, retention period, contact point and publication plan before collection.
2. Collect only what the stated research question needs; do not collect names, phone numbers, school identifiers or assessment answers by default.
3. Use separate, affirmative consent for research reuse. Analytics consent is not research consent.
4. For minors, obtain the required parent or guardian permission and age-appropriate assent before collecting responses.
5. Remove direct identifiers, suppress small groups and publish aggregate results only when a minimum sample threshold is met.
6. Provide a withdrawal route before publication and document who can access raw data.
7. Review the method and source links before every release; show missingness, sampling limits and uncertainty.

4. Current product default

Interactive worksheets and planners that say private by design run in the browser and do not save or send the user’s entries. Existing analytics uses a separate consent choice. We will not quietly repurpose local tool inputs as research data.

5. Verification and corrections

Every public dataset should state its provenance, version, verification date and limits. If a source changes, a route is withdrawn or an editorial classification is wrong, we will update the file and note the correction rather than silently preserving an outdated claim.

Browse the course-eligibility dataset · Browse the after-12th planning dataset · Browse the career catalogue dataset