Happy Summer to everyone

This edition was due in June, but I blinked, and apparently that month is no longer with us!

In fact, I’d like to say I have even the slightest sense of where spring and the first half of summer went, but my mother instilled a sense of honesty in the formation of your author’s young brain, so I’ll have to say it’s either flown by as a result of much fun and general jollification (unlikely), or senility is starting to kick in (the aforementioned chunk of time saw another birthday roll by, so the latter seems eminently more likely!).

So, what news from across the lands of Government, Public Services, and tacked-on other areas of interest? Well, there have been two elections, so there’s that. Speaking of, a massive internal thanks to the monumental efforts of the research team who had all the local election folks updated by the end of May and - including a 12-hour weekend shift on a Sunday, had all the freshly minted (and indeed re-elected - I believe there were a few) Members of Parliament updated within two days of the election. Followed by the necessity to update 3.4 million Constituency Names and Codes to reflect the boundary changes (we do love SQL - this took less than two minutes).

I could happily wax lyrical (or perhaps given the advancing years, nostalgic) about many other things, but I suspect your time is short, so on to the usual array of things in the established order:

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Updates:

As above, all MPs and Councillors updated with new geo units (almost another lie, a few council ward codes to go) and political parties since the May/July elections.

Following the closure of a number of Local Enterprise Partnerships, these have been removed from the live database, and functions transferred into the respective Local Authorities.

We have updated and added new annual spend bandings and exact values to over 11,000 organisations across the database since the last newsletter.

The NHS and Care Homes have been particularly focused on over the past three months, with Trusts, GP Surgeries, and Care Home Groups being especially under the spotlight. A reminder, where needed, for those consuming data via feeds and downloads to ensure you take regular updates. More broadly, the changes across the database from the past three months are summarised below for you:

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New:

Ofsted Ratings are now available for many Further and Higher Education entities. For those interested, just give your account manager a shout. We have added a new chart to the monthly tracking report of seats by political party. Worth a look here

We have added some detailed School annual spend data into the database. As before, if this is of interest, whether as data points appended to your current feeds or through interrogation for analysis or intel, just give us a shout to discuss what might be useful to you.

As part of our deepening foray into the world of Public Sector Intelligence, we have just completed our 2024 Schools report; this will be the first of a number of annual publications that take a deep dive into various sectors across the Public Sector. This one looks at the Academy Landscape, Schools vs Local and National political landscapes, Inspection performance, spend and income, and exclusion and suspension rates. This will be available for public consumption shortly, but any early birds/interested parties out there, just message us and we’ll send you a preview copy.

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Interesting:

Our work around smart automation, and in particular Intelligent Automation, continues apace. Having initially focused on a number of internal functions across customer support, finance, and research, we are now releasing Oscar Bot into the wild to assist our users and customers. Our cyber friend now has his own identity and webpage. Take a look, and if you think he might be able to enhance your days in the same way he does ours, take a gander here

I should also add that the recent winners of our internal Oscar awards are Sue - for her amazing work around the Civil Service and in particular heading up our MP and Lords databases and Alison for her tireless work on Local Government and in particular coordinating the annual election updates - without either, our database and company would be much the poorer!

That just about does it for the summer edition - hopefully the rains will abate and we can get back to that week of sunshine that annually graces our fair isles.

James and team at Oscar

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