This came in via the newsfeeds – I was surprised it wasn’t via an email alert from the DSA, but I guess that will come later.
The news release says that the DSA will start to publish its statistics each month, along with other g
overnment departments, as part of an overall “transparency policy” by the government.
There’s no substance to the rumour that it was Mike Penning’s daughter’s idea, and it appears he came up with this one all by himself.
I think we need to wait to see what the “change” brings. The DSA has published quite a lot of information for some time, and it can provide other data on request. However, what is clear that much of the time the DSA simply doesn’t have the data because it hasn’t recorded it either at all, or in the form that has been requested.
A good example is when someone requests something stupid like “how many ADIs passed part 3 on a Wednesday afternoon, and had an S in their names, between August 2010 and June 2011?” The DSA simply cannot answer it – and yes, that IS the kind of idiotic request they often get.
Seriously, though, some of the data could be quite useful – as you can see. So we can probably expect a sudden rush of bad analyses from all those amateur statisticians out there (every ADI on the register considers themselves to be better at maths than Archimedes was).
There is also a timeline of forthcoming data and report publication dates.