Category: data visualization

Visualizing the numbers of different types of school in the UK

how useful are different types of data visualization for displaying information about the number of schools in the UK, and how they are changing over time?

I’ve just been experimenting with different ways of visualizing the relative number of different types of school in the UK, and how these school types are changing over time.

The main school types I’ve focused on are:

  • nurseries
  • primary
  • middle (hardly any of these!)
  • secondary
  • non-maintained schools
  • special schools
  • pupil referral units.

You can view all of my visualizations on my Tableau profile. If you click on any of the images below, they will take you to the live vizes on Tableau.

The data comes from DFE’s Education and Training Stats 2018.

Tree Map of School Types in the UK

I think the Tree Map is the best way of providing an overview of the different types of school in the UK. As you can see from the tree map below, there are A LOT more primary schools than secondary schools in the UK, and primary and secondary together (unsurprisingly) account for most of the schools in the UK. In contrast, there are hardly any Pupil Referral Units.

NB – make sure you’ve only got one year box checked, otherwise you get totals of the years checked, which is pointless!

The limitations of the Tree Map Visualization

Although (IMO) this type of viz provides the best ‘frozen in time’ overview, it doesn’t actually allow you to make comparisons across time very easily, because you can only see the distribution for one year at a time.

One could overcome this by having two or more tree maps on display at once, but this still wouldn’t make for easy comparison as the layout of the boxes is likely to change as the data changes. To show changes over time effectively you need different types of visualization:

Changing schools viz 1

This is the most basic type of viz showing changes over time…

line chart showing changes to school types in the UK 2012-2016

Changing schools viz 2

I think viz 2 is much better as the fill gives you a much more immediate impression of how many of each type of school there is.

Changing schools viz 3

Given the relatively small amount of data for this particular viz I think this works quite nicely too, gives you a bit more of a sense of the relative numbers and much better for highlighting smaller numbers…

How useful are these visualizations?

As they stand they only show us a very general level of information, with no granularity. All of these vizes could be much more useful if you could ‘drill down’ into the data to see how the stats vary by England, Wales and Scotland.

Also, these have been designed as only the first stage in a story which also focus in on pupil numbers in different school types (also in relation to pupil types – male/ female etc.), and teacher numbers and teacher-student ratios.

There’s more to come!

How equal are men and women in the UK?

The gap between men and women in terms of pay, and representation in big companies is decreasing rapidly, but significant inequalities remain in both of these areas, domestic life, and chances of being a victim of sexual assault. All of this is despite the fact that girls have been outperforming boys at GCSE (and above) for decades. The only area of life where there seems to be equality is reported happiness levels, yet women still report slightly higher anxiety levels.

This post summarises statistics from six key areas of social life:

  • income – the gender pay gap.
  • domestic life – amount of time spent on leisure and unpaid work
  • economic power – the proportion of women represented on the boards of large companies
  • education – GCSE results
  • crime – the number of men and women who have been victims of sexual assault.
  • well being – reported levels of  happiness and anxiety.

There are a lot statistics available on gender inequality (both in the UK and worldwide) and here I’ve tried to select just six key statistics that summarize the state of gender inequality today.

I’ve kept the data to a minimum so as to avoid information overload, as this post is written as part of an introduction to A-level sociology for students in their first week of study. I’ve also deliberately selected data that is relevant to the topics students are likely to be studying deeper into the A-level, such as families and households and education, so they can get a first look at it now.

If you want to find out more about trends in gender equality in the U.K. I recommend the U.K. Government’s Gender Equality Monitor, which tracks progress towards gender equality.  This recent report was very much the basis for this post!

NB – you’ll find it easier just read the charts if you click here to get to my Tableau Public page where I’ve stored all of the data visualizations below.

Women’s Income compared to men’s 

The gender pay gap has fallen by about 10 percentage points since 1997, but the pay gap remains at just below 9%. 

Source: ONS: Gender Pay Gap in the UK, 2018.

Number of women running big companies

Source: Hampton-Alexander Review FTSE Women Leaders Improving gender balance in FTSE Leadership, November 2018.

GCSE results 

The 9-4 and 9-5 GCSE pass rates for girls are both approximately 7% higher than the corresponding pass rate for boys.

Source: GCSE and equivalent results: 2017 to 2018 (provisional).

Leisure and unpaid work 


Women report having an hour less leisure time per day and do an hour’s more unpaid work per day than men

Source: ONS analysis of UK Harmonised European Time Use Survey (HETUS), 2015.

Chances of being a victim of sexual assault

While the rates of BCS reported sexual assaults against females have fallen significantly, females are still more than three times more likely to be victims than males.

Source: ONS.

Happiness and anxiety 


Despite all of the above the reported happiness levels are almost identical for both males and females, and female anxiety levels are only slighter higher than male anxiety levels!

Source: ONS, Personal well-being estimates in the UK: October 2016 to September 2017.

Conclusions/ about this post

Hopefully you found this post useful, writing it has been a bit of a learning curve as I’m currently teaching myself how to use Tableau to do data visualizations.

Related Posts….

You might like to cross-reference this post with the four Feminist Theories you need to now about for A-level Sociology (Radical, Liberal, Marxist and Difference Feminisms) and consider which theories the above data support or criticise.

Postscript/ Sources

The Equality Monitor Report of 2019 gathered a lot of data together in one report, but in 2023 you need to go to different sources to gather more up to date data.

ONS: Gender Pay Gap in the UK 2022

FTSE Women Leaders: 2023 Review: Achieving Gender Balance.

OFQUAL: GCSE outcomes in England

Census 2021: Families and the Labour Market

What’s the most valid representation of trends in Life Expectancy?

Here’s a dual line chart showing trends in life expectancy for males and females in the UK from 1948 to 2016….

The above chart is only one way of visualizing this data, starting at zero. It gives the impression of a steadily increasing life expectancy for both sexes, with little difference between them.

 

Visualizing starting at age 64

However, if you cut off the bottom 60 odd years, you get the impression of a much faster increase in life expectancy and you also get the impression of a more rapidly closing gap between male and female life expectancy:

 

Same data, two different impressions…. the first ‘calm and steady’, the second ‘rapid and intense’ – it just goes to show how easy it is to ‘distort’ even ‘hard’ data in the visualisation/ representation phase!