The materials, including worksheets and a series of podcasts, are freely available for teachers to incorporate into their lessons.
Year 8 students from Radyr Comprehensive School and Pontarddulais Comprehensive School in Cardiff worked with Dr Alice Reid and colleagues from Cambridge, Leicester and Edinburgh Universities, to co-produce a learning resource about exploring the census in the past and present. They explored the Populations Past and Data Shine websites to discover facts about their local area and compared them with other parts of England and Wales.
After exploring the websites, the students drew up a set of interview questions to ask experts on historical and recent censuses, including the former National Statistician, Dame Jil Matheson. These interviews were recorded as podcasts.
The collaboration is part of the ‘Engaging the Public in Census 2021 project’, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), part of UK Research and Innovation. This project teaches students about the relevance of the census and provides insight into being a data-driven social scientist.
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge