Reviewing duplicate candidates

Once a district has been evaluated, each record type with flagged candidates has its own review page. For schools and teachers this is a list table of all the candidate pairs (including ones already merged or marked not a duplicate); opening a still-suspected pair from it takes you to a candidate-comparison page where a person looks at the two records and decides whether they are really the same thing. The decisions made on the candidate pages are the only point at which data is actually merged or removed.

You reach a review page by clicking a Type link (School Deduplication, Teacher Deduplication, School Visits Deduplication, Teacher Visits Deduplication or Pupil Assessments Deduplication) in the district results table. See Evaluating a district.

Merges and deletions are permanent

Merging two records into one, or deleting a record, cannot be undone. Always verify a pair is genuinely a duplicate (a phone call to the official who recorded it is the safest check) before you act.

Verifying before you decide: Officials to Contact

Each candidate-comparison page starts with an Officials to Contact card. It is a table of the district’s operating officials, with their Name, Phone Number and the dates they Visited School. The purpose is simple: before merging records, a reviewer can phone the official who collected them and confirm whether they really refer to the same school or teacher.

Use this card first. A quick call removes most of the guesswork and prevents a permanent mistake.

Reviewing schools and teachers

For schools and teachers, the Type link first opens a list table of every candidate pair, including ones already merged or marked not a duplicate. Each row shows the two records side by side as links (School 1 / School 2, or Teacher 1 / Teacher 2), their visit counts (S1 Visits / S2 Visits for schools, or T1 Visits / T2 Visits for teachers), the Certainty, the Status, and a Decision column. While a pair is still suspected, its Decision cell holds a link (labelled with the pair, such as Deduplication (School A & School B)); following it takes you to the candidate-comparison page for that pair. Pairs that are already resolved show a - instead. These merge decisions are for senior managers and above.

On the candidate-comparison page you compare the two records and choose how to resolve them. If the pair has already been merged, the page shows a Merged Entity section with the surviving record. Otherwise you see:

• A Duplicate Candidates side-by-side comparison, with the first record on one side and the second on the other, so you can read their details, teachers and visits together.
• A set of Merge Decision buttons.

The three decisions are:

Decision	What it does	Confirmation
Merge Two Into One	Combines the second record into the first; the first survives	”Merge into one?”
Merge One into Two	Combines the first record into the second; the second survives	”Merge into two?”
Do not Merge	Marks the pair as not a duplicate, so it stops being flagged	”Do not merge?”

Each one asks you to confirm before it runs. A merge reassigns everything belonging to the absorbed record (its teachers, visits and so on) to the surviving record, then removes the absorbed one. Do not Merge leaves both records untouched and simply records that they are different.

Reviewing visits and assessments

For school visits, teacher visits and pupil assessments, the page groups records that look like repeats (for example, visits that share the same school, form, monitor and date). The actions here are available to junior managers and above.

The options are:

• Delete removes a single record. For pupil assessments the confirmation reads “Are you sure you want to delete this Pupil Assessment?”.
• Merge others into keeps the record you choose and folds the rest of the group into it. For a school visit the dialog reads “This action will merge all other school visits into this one”; for a teacher visit, “This action will merge all other teacher visits into this one”. The button is Merge.
• Mark as not duplicate (shown for pupil assessments while a pair is still suspected) records that the items are genuinely different. Its dialog reads “Are you sure you want to mark these pupil assessments as not duplicate?”.

These actions are permanent too

Deleting a visit or assessment, or merging a group into one, cannot be reversed. The merge tooltip in the dashboard puts it plainly: this operation is permanent, so do it carefully.

A safe review routine

1. Open the review page from the district results table, and for schools and teachers follow a suspected pair’s Decision link to its candidate-comparison page.
2. Read the Officials to Contact card and phone-verify anything you are unsure about.
3. Compare the records side by side (schools and teachers) or within the group (visits and assessments).
4. Choose the right action: merge, delete, or mark as not a duplicate.
5. Read the confirmation text, then confirm.

Work through the flagged records this way and the district’s suspected counts will fall as you resolve each one.