Reporting from the January 2025 UK school census, which included the category ‘Down syndrome’ for pupils for the first time, is expected in June.
We’ve called for this as the DS community for a long time!
I’m interested to know who is planning to review the data when it’s released and whether it will provide data sets that researchers and service providers can work with?
1 Like
Thank you Leela for posting!
Yes, we plan to review it. We hope it will give an accurate picture of placement types, regional variations and differences between age groups.
There is a new education statistics API that should make it straightforward to automate the analysis of the variables of interest every time a new update is released.
We would be pleased to work with others on this.
|
|
Leela Baksi reacted to your message: |
Hi Frank, that’s good to know! I think it’s important that people with Down syndrome are invited to review the data and share their thoughts, possibly through online meetings. Are any groups or organisations already planning something like this?
Not that I am aware of.
So, I thought I would take a look at the existing data (2015/6-2023/4), ahead of the release that will include counts of pupils with Down syndrome.
It might be interesting to look at patterns in placements over time and to compare the 2024/5 counts when published to see which categories the pupils with Down syndrome were classified in prior years.
I’ve created a repository with some scripts for downloading the data and beginning to look at it:
I would be delighted to collaborate with anyone also interested in looking at this.
