UK's Nudge Unit tests machine learning to rate schools and GPs

The government's'Nudge Unit' is experimenting with using machine learning algorithms to rate how well schools and doctors' surgeries are performing. For the last year, The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) has been trialling machine learning models that can crunch through publicly available data to help automate some of the decisions made by bodies such as Ofsted, which inspects schools, and the Care Quality Commission, which regulates health and social care in England. Michael Sanders, head of research at the BIT says it is working with Ofsted to put the technology into use during 2018. "We're working with them to feed into variations on our model and to improve it using additional data that they have that isn't public," he says. The school-evaluating algorithm pulls together data from a large number of sources to decide whether a school is potentially performing inadequately. It is said the system can help to identify more schools that are inadequate, when compared to random inspections.