Inequalities in our place

Can I remind you to check out Laurel's latest adventures on a ship sailing around Svalbard on the COLDPHOTO blog. Great images!

OK, so we then explored the idea of MULTIPLE DEPRIVATION.
Deprivation: this is something that you are deprived of, which means that either you:

• don't have it in the first place
• have less of it than other people
• have something, but then it's taken away from you

The somethings in question are the various indicators that are used to build up what call an INDEX OF DEPRIVATION. This is a selection of statistics, each of which contributes to the overall picture of a place.
Deprivation is measured by data collected from each of the following topic areas known as domains.

1. Income
2. Employment
3. Health and Disablity
4. Education, skills and training
5. Barriers to Housing and Services
6. Crime
7. Living Environment

Many towns have areas which are classed as deprived. This doesn't sound quite so innocent a word if you are living in one of those areas, and want to sell your house, get car insurance etc.

We will use the NATIONAL STATISTICS website. This gives you the chance to explore statistics collected at the 2001 Census
Click the NEIGHBOURHOOD tab at the top of the home page, and you'll be taken to the screen below:

We put in some postcodes for King's Lynn and discovered some fascinating variation in scores for deprivation for different areas of the town. Use the NEIGHBOURHOOD SUMMARY section.
We first of all put in the postcode for the area including the school:The scores for deprivation go from 1, being the most deprived area in the country, and a score of 32,482 being the least deprived...
On this continuum, the area around the school scores 13,924, which is in the poorest 50% of all areas. We then put in some other postcodes, and discovered that some areas of King's Lynn scored only 1,400 and others scored almost 32000: quite a difference !

Which areas of the country score the lowest and highest ?

There are apparently 9 types of DEPRIVED (or disadvantaged) AREAS according to a report by the Prime Minister's office: they are -

1. Regional Centres e.g. Sheffield, Liverpool, Newcastle
2. Northern / Midlands Centres e.g. Rochdale, Coventry
3. London Suburbs e.g. Croydon, Waltham Forest
4. Inner London e.g. Hackney, Tower Hamlets
5. Otherwise prospering towns e.g. Peterborough, King's Lynn (yes, we're in there...)
6. Coastal e.g. Hastings
7. Industrial hinterlands e.g. Sedgefield
8. Manufacturing towns e.g. Rotherham (and so's my birthplace), Doncaster and Wigan
(all 3 of which are featured in Pies and Prejudice...)
9. Rural e.g. Derwentdale

You can check this for an area you don't know well by getting a streetmap from your friendly online map provider and then use the ROYAL MAIL POSTCODE FINDER.

Coming soon: the second coursework task, which is once again adapted from a model kindly provided by Paula Cooper and colleagues at the King Edward VI 5 Ways School. I'll work on this over the weekend when I get a chance.

TEACHER NOTE
If you're here looking for ideas for teaching Pilot GCSE, please head over to the KING EDWARD VI WEBSITE
You'll find all the various schemes of work that were developed at the school, and they've certainly produced a good framework for the work we've done this year.

Map produced by Rachel Tuckett: student at King Edward VI School and was the winning entry in a national competition last year - this is an excellent piece of work, and fits in very nicely with the idea of MY PLACE. I looked at this at the time and didn't make the connection between it, and the Pilot.