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We now have the capacity to gather data in huge quantities, as well as to process and analyse it at previously unimaginable speeds. So what if you were to put sensors in a school and start hoovering up the data generated there? What could you learn? Might you discover that particular classrooms should always be in use because pupils learn best in them? What about the optimum temperature needed to aid concentration?

And what about making better use of the data pupils can gather via their smartphones? We are all familiar with the arguments for and against using mobile phones in lessons, but how deeply have we thought about the features phones offer beyond the ability to search the internet and communicate?

We can use phones to track our movements, record how active we are, monitor what we’re eating and see how well we’re sleeping. So, if pupils tracked their steps, could a school - working with them - use that data to help increase their activity or would it be too disruptive? School timetablers attempt to minimise the distance pupils have to walk between lessons, but could longer routes provide both a brain break and some exercise?

A Scottish secondary and a university are now working together to explore all of this and more, as part of the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal announced last year, which is worth an estimated £1.3 billion over 15 years.

The deal has “data-driven innovation” as a key focus, and aims to turn the area into “the data capital of Europe”. The University of Edinburgh is charged with running the £2.4 million Data Education in Schools project. It is led by Professor Judy Robertson, chair in digital learning; Kate Farrell, a former computing teacher, who is the project’s director of curriculum development and professional learning; and Tommy Lawson, a former assistant head, who now specialises in digital education and splits his time between the university and working for Midlothian Council as a learning technology education officer.

Their challenge is to get data science lessons up and running in about 500 primaries and secondaries in the six local authorities involved in the city deal: Edinburgh; East Lothian; Fife; Midlothian; the Scottish Borders; and West Lothian.

Newbattle Community High School in Midlothian has become their testbed. The school’s ambition, since it moved to new premises last year, has been to become a digital centre of excellence, as part of broader aims for improving “data literacy” - and, through this, the economy - in the area.

Plugged into the internet of things

In the week I visit, Newbattle High has had a long range wide area network (LoRaWan) connected, which will allow data from sensors in one classroom to be fed back to the “secure cloud” at the University of Edinburgh’s Easter Bush Campus.

LoRaWans have been developed to make the “internet of things” a reality, so that all kinds of devices - from the radiators in your home to the lampposts outside it - can be connected over the internet, allowing them to continually feed back information on their performance, while using minimal power.

Now that Newbattle High has been plugged into to one of these networks, data will start to be gathered on, for example, the temperature inside the school, as well as pollution and light levels. The goal is that the data generated will allow pupils to see first-hand how information can be collected and used to make improvements - by stepping into the shoes of data scientists.

The impact remains to be seen, but getting heating and lighting right (as basic as those things may seem) can, of course, have a big influence on learning, as anyone who has broiled in a poorly ventilated classroom on a hot summer’s day will know.

“The sensors will be able to measure things like CO2 levels and temperature, and the light level,” says Lawson. “These are all things we are beginning to lift as data. So we know that too much CO2 diminishes the ability of young people to learn, but we don’t know if there’s CO2 unless we measure it.”

He adds: “The next stage will be allowing the young people to design and build their own environmental sensors.”

The school also plans to monitor the mood of its pupils at different times of the day by allowing them to rate how they are feeling, in the same kind of way as you might be encouraged to rate your experience going through an airport by selecting a sad, ambivalent or happy emoji. That information will be collected and, if it turns out the mood is low, for instance, uplifting music will be played and the lighting will change.

The idea - due to become a reality this term - was put forward by S2-3 pupils during a project designed to enable them to interact more with the data they generate. Farrell points out that pupils produce a lot of data, but do not often get access to it. “Reports get printed off a couple of times a year, and teachers and senior management teams engage with the data, but that’s it,” she says.

The academics have also been encouraging Newbattle High pupils to become aware of the data they generate without realising they are doing so. Many pupils have smartphones capable of measuring the number of steps they are walking, for example, but when this point was raised with S1s, the bulk of them were not aware of the feature.

“That project is about kids understanding the information these devices can give them, but also getting them to think about ways they can change their habits,” says Robertson. “We know we are meant to take 10,000 steps a day, but if we see we are only taking 7,000, how do we change that? Sometimes just having the information is not enough.”

The pupils will be taught how to gather data, interpret and report on it. Farrell predicts one key question will be how to avoid sitting all day in school, given that we know how bad long sedentary periods of time are for the body. Newbattle High has recently acquired a small number of standing desks in two classrooms. The pupils’ findings might lead to more being introduced, Farrell suggests. Another possibility might be holding the occasional silent disco - when groups of people dance to their own choice of music played over their headphones.

“It’s about the kids taking ownership of their data and having a bit of power over it,” says Farrell. “Too many people are just ticking terms-and-conditions boxes and thinking they don’t have control, but they do. We have GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] - we can find out what the data companies are collecting about us and change our behaviour based on what we are finding out. We can also gather data ourselves and analyse it. We might find out that the pupils at Newbattle High are sitting for the perfect amount of time, but until we get the data, we can’t make sensible, informed decisions.”

Some, however, might question the wisdom of schools - which tend to be awash with information - gathering yet more data. The collaboration between the university and the school will therefore also look at how to make better use of the data already being collected on attendance, attainment, exclusion, pupil happiness, staff wellbeing, poverty, destinations, care experience - the list goes on.

The problem, according to Lawson, is that such data sets do not “talk to each other”.

“These data sets sit in silos,” he says. “The information collected on Seemis [the Scottish ICT system for recording pupils attendance and personal information] is used to look at learning and teaching, but it does not come across to the happiness data set and the environmental data set. We need to start finding out how one affects the other.”

Gillian Docherty, chief executive of the Data Lab - which was set up to ensure Scotland capitalises on the data revolution - is passionate about the use of “data for good”.

Already Scottish colleges, such as Ayrshire College, are using data to predict which students are at risk of dropping out and taking steps to support them, she says: “They can intervene, put in additional support and reduce attrition rates. Previously, that would not have been possible, and the student would drop out and lose all of that potential opportunity open to them. But the data and the experience of the college staff can help build the right approach to use for these students.”

A recent report predicted that data would be worth £20 billion to the Scottish economy, Docherty says, but more significantly, it can be used to “enhance lives”. In a TED Talk in 2017, she envisaged a world in which - by the time her then six-year-old daughter was 26 - she would be wearing 3D-printed clothes based on scans of her body, using augmented-reality contact lenses to see information about people she passed in the street, and following a data-led diet, exercise and sleep regime perfectly in sync with the needs of her body.

However, schools need to get better at equipping young people for this data revolution, Docherty believes. Even pupils who are not destined to become analysts and interpreters of data need to become informed citizens who understand what is happening to their information, she argues.

The University of Edinburgh’s work with Newbattle High revealed some pupils were using an exercise app that rewarded them with digital money if they upped their activity levels. This virtual cash could then be spent on gadgets, sports kit or fitness training. But what the pupils did not appreciate was that the app was also harvesting data about their movements, says Farrell.

“They [the app’s creators] would know what time [pupils] left school, which way they turned after school to head home, where they gathered after school. Can you imagine how beneficial that data set would be to a company that wants to set up a food van, for instance?

“It’s about getting the kids to think, ‘Is it worth it [to hand over this data]?’ It might be that it is, but they need to be making informed decisions.”

‘Just because we can, should we?’

Docherty recently interviewed whistleblower Christopher Wylie, who sparked a major political scandal early last year when it was revealed - through documents he shared with the media - that Cambridge Analytica had harvested the personal data of millions of people’s Facebook profiles without their consent and used it for political purposes.

Wylie compares data to electricity, explains Docherty: while it can be dangerous, “we do not just say we just won’t use electricity”, and he argues the same attitude should apply to data.

Docherty agrees. “We need to bring the right ethics and values to how we use data, and to ask the question: just because we can, should we?” she says.

Raising that awareness is integral to the work that the University of Edinburgh plans to take forward in schools. Already, it forms part of a new National Progression Award (NPA) in data science, designed by the university with Newbattle High and the Scottish Qualifications Authority, which will be available to pupils from June. As well as learning how to gather data from different sources, analyse it and report on what they have found, pupils taking the NPA will look at how data is used and its pros and cons.

However, this futuristic world that Docherty says we should be equipping pupils for will seem light years away for some teachers. Newbattle High relocated in June to an all-singing, all-dancing new building where the wi-fi works and there is good access to devices such iPads and laptops. But before that, it was housed in a 1960s building where it was only possible to get wi-fi in half the school, while laptops and tablets were a scarce commodity; school PCs, teachers say, also took an eternity to fire up. It is a picture that will be familiar to many teachers.

Then, of course, there is the issue of having staff who are qualified to cultivate and nurture the data enthusiasts of the future - a challenge, given the national shortage of maths and computing teachers. At Newbattle High, despite their best efforts to recruit, they have just one computing science teacher.

The national situation is not ideal, admits Farrell. But the new NPA in data science has been designed with this in mind; the unit on understanding how data is used can be taught by a variety of subject specialists. Newbattle High has made digital literacy the responsibility of all teachers to deliver - in the same way that, under Curriculum for Excellence, literacy, numeracy, and health and wellbeing are the responsibility of all.

Every S1-3 pupil at Newbattle High gets one period per week dedicated to digital literacy, and the course is delivered by 30 teachers, ranging from science specialists to history and geography teachers. Pupils are taught about the risks of phishing, how to create secure passwords, and how to know if the information they find online is accurate and from a reliable source.

The school has also employed two “learning technologists”, Ewan McCabe and Jonathan Mori, who don’t take lessons but help teachers to see where they could enhance the curriculum by using technology, and support them to overcome problems and glitches. One of their biggest coups has been the introduction of virtual reality to Newbattle High for a bargain-basement price.

All this effort and investment - Newbattle High receives an additional £200,000 per year from Midlothian Council to realise its ambition of becoming a digital centre of excellence - is ultimately about securing a better future for pupils, say the school’s leaders. Newbattle High has the most deprived catchment area of Midlothian’s six secondaries, but a lot of families with pupils at the school are affected by in-work poverty, according to headteacher Gib McMillan. Mothers and fathers often work multiple jobs to make ends meet, and there is pressure on young people to leave school and start contributing to the household income.

A significant number of senior pupils have part-time jobs, adds depute head Mark Davidson, who is the digital centre coordinator; the danger is that those jobs become full-time, almost by accident.

The school’s positive-destination statistics - the proportion of pupils going on to education, training and employment - show it is punching above its weight. But the young people who end up in work are often low-paid, says McMillan. The focus on data science and digital literacy, therefore, is seen as a way of getting pupils into some of the better-quality, higher-paid jobs that the regional deal has promised.

The move to become a digital centre of excellence is also very much about “smiles on faces, calmness and the atmosphere in the building”, says McMillan.

Apart from everything else, learning through, and about, technology excites pupils and increases engagement.

Emma Seith is a reporter for 91���� Scotland. She tweets

This article originally appeared in the 17 May 2019 issue under the headline “Data with destiny”