Assessing the Usefulness of Secondary Qualitative Data to Research Education

Last Updated on October 18, 2026 by Karl Thompson

How useful is secondary qualitative data when researching education? This post considers the theoretical, practical and ethical strengths and limitations of public and personal documents produced in the context of education, such as Ofsted reports, school websites, school reports and messages sent between pupils.

For what secondary qualitative data is in general, and John Scott’s criteria for judging documents (authenticity, credibility, representativeness and meaning), start with Secondary Qualitative Data in Sociology. This post applies that material to education.

Public and personal documents in education

Public documents	Personal documents
Ofsted inspection reports School websites School prospectuses School policy documents School textbooks	School reports on pupils Pupils’ written work Pupils’ and teachers’ diaries Notes and text messages passed between pupils

Using public documents to research education

Practical issues

Many public documents on education are freely available. Ofsted reports on every state school can be read online, and schools publish a wide variety of information about themselves on their websites.

In fact, since 2012, maintained schools have been legally required to publish certain information on a website. This includes their admissions arrangements, their latest key stage 4 results, where to find their Ofsted report and the government’s performance tables, details of the curriculum, their behaviour policy and how they spend their Pupil Premium funding. The same regulations removed the old requirement to publish a printed prospectus.

Schools also produce a huge variety of policy documents, such as student codes of conduct, equal opportunities policies and safeguarding policies. These are likely to be made available to researchers on request, since they are a matter of public record. They are useful because they give the ‘official’ picture of schools from the perspective of management.

Validity

School websites and prospectuses can be trusted to provide basic information, such as what subjects are on offer, exam results and extra-curricular activities. HOWEVER, their credibility is undermined by the fact that they are produced to advertise the school, and all of them put a positive spin on the school or college. For example, although schools are required to publish their results, they have some freedom over how they present them, so they can portray themselves in the best possible light.

Suggested activity: visit the websites of your past school and present college. To what extent do they give you an accurate picture of what life was actually like there?

Extension activity: look at the website of another school in your area, one that is very different in terms of results and so on. Are the impressions you get of the two schools that different? Or are they quite similar, which would suggest that school websites are designed to a formula and really tell you very little about a particular school?

Ofsted reports may provide greater insight into what’s going on in a school than the statistical snapshot of yearly exam results. HOWEVER, a full inspection normally lasts only two days, and schools are inspected roughly once every four years. So it is quite easy for a school to put on an act for such a short period and give a performance which is better than usual.

Might some schools be able to put on a better performance than usual during a brief Ofsted inspection?

Conversely, some schools feel they have been harshly judged by Ofsted, and question whether the report reflects the reality of school life. Inspectors see only a snapshot of lessons in two days, and different inspection teams may focus on different things in different schools, raising the prospect that schools are not all being judged by the same standard.

It is also worth knowing that the way Ofsted reports on schools changed in November 2025. Single overall grades such as “outstanding” were replaced by report cards, which grade a school on several separate areas using a five-point scale running from “urgent improvement” to “exceptional”. For a researcher, that means reports written before and after November 2025 can’t be compared directly.

Policy documents produced by schools, such as codes of conduct, might be useful for seeing how schools function in an ideal world. HOWEVER, they lack validity in that they tell you nothing about how many students actually stick to the code of conduct, or what is done with students who break it. To get more insight into this, a researcher would need access to the records of individual students, which would be much more difficult to obtain.

Representativeness

State schools are required to publish key information, and the government publishes performance tables for state schools, so these documents cover close to 100% of them.

The same has not always been true of Ofsted reports. From 2012 to 2020, schools judged outstanding were legally exempt from routine inspection. When Ofsted started reinspecting them, some had not been inspected for as long as 15 years, and in 2021/22 over 80% of those given a graded inspection lost their outstanding grade. So for years, the Ofsted reports on some of the most highly rated schools were badly out of date. That’s a good example of a document losing validity simply because of when it was written.

Using personal documents to research education

Suggested starter activity: have a browse of a teacher’s blog such as ‘Scenes from the Battleground’. What impression does it give you of school life? How valid and representative do you think it is?

Personal documents in the context of education include school reports on pupils, pupils’ written work, pupils’ and teachers’ diaries, and notes and text messages passed between pupils.

Practical issues

For a start, these will be very difficult to access. Things like teacher mark books, records of conversations with students and disciplinary records may not be available because of the ethical requirement to safeguard children’s privacy, and because of data protection law (GDPR). The same could also be true of pupils’ written work.

Where private messages and texts are concerned, it is unlikely that researchers will be allowed access to students’ personal mobile phones or tablets. Even if they could gain access, threads of conversation may have been deleted shortly after they took place, and the more ‘anti-school’ such messages are, the more likely they are to have been deleted.

Validity

The personal documents which are readily available are likely to be of a public nature (social media accounts, for example). Because they are public, they will have been subject to impression management, to make sure they are socially acceptable. That can give us an insight into what pupils and teachers think is acceptable to say in public, but using them to build a picture of what people actually think about school life is problematic.

The more personal and private a document is, the higher its validity is likely to be. HOWEVER, the number of people who write down in-depth personal accounts of their school experiences is tiny.

Representativeness

If a researcher could gain access to social media accounts and personal messaging services, representativeness should be good, as the majority of students use these services.

HOWEVER, hardly anyone keeps a diary any more, so representativeness is a problem there.

If a researcher is lucky enough to gain access to disciplinary records, these may not be representative of the actual underlying patterns of student misbehaviour. Teacher bias may increase the number of certain types of students who go through disciplinary procedures, which is the labelling argument applied to school records.

Ethical issues

There are few ethical problems with using public documents such as Ofsted reports and school websites, since they were written to be read by the public.

Personal documents raise more concerns. If a researcher is given access to teacher mark books, records of conversations with students or disciplinary records, this won’t necessarily be with the informed consent of the pupils concerned. Even pupils’ public social media posts need care: most school pupils are under 18, and posting something publicly is not the same as agreeing to be researched.

How this comes up in the exam

Documents can come up as the method in a 20-mark Methods in Context question on Paper 1, applied to an education topic in the item. The approach is in How to Answer Methods in Context Questions, and the research contexts the mark scheme rewards (pupils, teachers, parents, classrooms and schools) are covered in the Researching in education posts linked below.

Signposting

This post has been written primarily for students studying research methods in context, as part of the AQA’s A-level Sociology course.

Secondary Qualitative Data in Sociology and Personal Documents in Social Research cover the method in general.

Official Statistics on Educational Achievement looks at the main kind of secondary quantitative data on education.

Researching in education: Pupils · Teachers · Parents · Classrooms · Issues in schools

Please click here to return to the Research Methods page, or here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com.