The brief:
To publish a public portal making all collected data on identified vulnerable groups of children available
The client
The Children’s Commissioner (Anne Longfield) is independent from the government and promotes and protects the rights of children. Her office wants to ensure that their data around vulnerable children is easy to access, understand and use in order to help drive development in policy.
Our solution:
We created a WordPress plug-in containing all the data pages to sit within the over-arching Children’s Commissioner website. It automatically generates all of the statistics around the 72 identified vulnerable groups from a single csv. It allows the data to be organised in to defined ‘categories’ and encourages the user of the site to search to find statistics and data that is relevant to them.
The office hopes that journalists, policy makers and councils will find the data extremely useful in giving them insights on the numbers for vulnerable children in England.
A quick click through screencast of the data pages is below.
Moving forward
There is much we can do to develop the portal further, particularly around location based searching and finding relevant data. We also want to look in to linking in a more narrative aspect to the data, grounding it with the policy work that the Children’s Commissioner takes an active part in.
Part of the motivation for publishing out the data is also to identify gaps, and areas that need more or better data gathering to be able to understand the full picture, so working with the office to identify these areas will be something we want to be involved in.
