Getting to know your Community part two

Okay, so here are the answers, let us see how you got on. I wonder how you found that activity, whether you got any answers right, whether any of them surprised you. It can be quite interesting to find out how our population is actually made up when we are just basing our normal understanding of our population on the news, and media, and the presentations that we are given there. I will say one word of warning around statistics because obviously they can be used in any which way to help form your argument. They can sometimes be a bit out of date. So these ones are 2011, but they are the most up to date statistics that the Office of National Statistics produces.

Sometimes areas can be very transient, populations can change from almost six months at a time. You can have different groups coming through, depending on the area and the needs and the things that are going on on a political level in that particular place. They can also from time to time to not always match up with their geographical area. So I have managed to find the latest statistics that meet England and Wales, but you might find that when you are looking for statistics likely that they include some wards or some areas, and another set will include a whole bunch more wards. So you have to take into account that there might be discrepancies there.

Sometimes statistics can be skewed, and you need to make sure that when you are showing statistics to back up your ideas and your evidence, that you reference them and you let people know where you got them from and when they were taken, what date they were made. So we just completed the task that looked at national statistics. But I would like you to be able to go off and find statistics that suit your locality, your community because I think it is important that you get to know your local community.

Some places have lots of information, some local authorities provide great statistical information on their communities. Some health authorities have some really good information. I get a lot of my stuff from the Office of National Statistics and they will allow you to do very localised breakdowns, often to a ward level, rather than statutory levels. It is important that you explore the population of your community, look at it from as many different angles as possible. There are some obvious ideas of looking at things like race and ethnicity, religion, age, but you can also sometimes find statistics on income, people working, whether people have more than one dependent at home. These could all be information that helps you understand who your community is. Because if you can understand who your community is, you can then work out whether they are using your service, whether they are engaging with your service, and you can then from that deduct, "Well, if this community is not using our service, what can we do to help reach them? What can we do to make our service more attractive to this particular group?" So if you do not know your community, you are not gonna be able to identify who you are not serving.

So in the next section, I want us to think about how do we know who is using our service? How do we find out who is making contact with us and how accessible we are? What kind of treatment people receive when they come to your service.