Bracknell Forest Profile – Ward Profiles

Profiles for the 18 Bracknell Forest wards have been prepared by the Berkshire Shared Team based at Bracknell Forest Council.

These files were completed in July 2018 with published data up to 2016. (Please see usage notes below)

These present local data on a wide variety of topics including demography, deprivation, poverty and access to services, economy and enterprise, education, health, and community safety using results from the 2011 Census and other data sources.

Ward Profiles

• Ascot
• Binfield with Warfield
• Bullbrook
• Central Sandhurst
• College Town
• Crown Wood
• Crowthorne
• Great Hollands North
• Great Hollands South
• Hanworth
• Harmans Water
• Little Sandhurst and Wellington
• Old Bracknell
• Owlsmoor
• Priestwood and Garth
• Warfield Harvest Rise
• Wildridings and Central
• Winkfield and Cranbourne

JSNA Ward Profile User Guide

Introduction

The Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA) Electoral Ward profiles have been produced by Public Health Services for Berkshire on behalf of the local councils. The purpose of the ward profiles is to identify areas for further investigation and to provoke discussion with commissioners and elected members. This user guide aims to help users interpret the JSNA Ward profiles. These profiles will be continually developed and we welcome any feedback, comments, and suggestions from users.

A note on small area data

We need to be careful when drawing conclusions from data which has come from a small sample. This is because small sample data is more easily affected by chance variation which is not due to any measurable cause. We strongly recommend reading the further information on interpreting data taken from small samples provided in appendix 1 of this document.

On occasions particular data may not be available for a Ward. This will be indicated by a missing bar on a chart or will be indicated in the text. This is due to the data containing numbers of less than five. To comply with data protection, these numbers cannot be included due to the risk of identifying individuals who may not wish to be identified.

General tips for using the profiles

The profiles display a range of indicators which should be considered as a whole picture of the Ward rather than focusing on individual indicators in isolation.

Information about the age structure and deprivation of the Ward is provided at the beginning of the profiles and this context is essential for interpreting the rest of the profiles, in particular when comparing the Ward to other areas.

The profiles should be used as a guide to provoke further discussion and investigation. The data cannot be used in isolation and should be supplemented with further data to delve deeper into any issues of interest.

Any discussion about the information contained within should consider the caveats around the indicators and data included.

Step by step guide through the profiles

Summary

This provides a text summary of the information contained within the rest of the profiles. This is accompanied by a ‘spine chart’ of key indicators.

Spine charts are a really useful way of summarising a number of data on one page. They should be used as a quick reference to guide the user to areas particularly worthy of further investigation.

Demographics

The demographic data in the profiles provides the contextual information about the Ward. It tells us something of the basic characteristics of the people living in the Ward and should be considered when looking at the rest of the profiles.

Population data is shown as 2016 mid year population estimates. The remaining demographic data is taken from the Census 2011.

The population pyramid shows how the age/gender structure of the Ward population compares, on average, to the rest of the local authority. The hollow bars represent the local authority and the filled bars represent the Ward. Females are shown to the left of centre and males to the right. Where there are overlaps, we can identify the differences in population structure.

Deprivation

The index of multiple deprivation (IMD) (including access to services (access to GP, food shops, primary school etc)) is a measure of relative deprivation which ranks each area in the country on a number of measures of deprivation including but not limited to income deprivation. The Ward profiles show where each Ward ranks within the local authority.

Child poverty figures show the percentage of 0 to 19 year olds living in households in receipt of Child Tax Credits where income is below 60% of median income or in households in receipt of Income Support/Job Seekers Allowance.

Please see ‘education’ for details around the free school meals data.

The deprivation data in the profiles should be used alongside the demographic data as context when looking at the rest of the profiles.

Economy and enterprise

Benefit data is presented from 2013. It is important to note that the numbers of benefit claimants may be alter based on the month of the data. All further data included in the economy and enterprise section is sourced from the Census 2011.

Education

Education data was requested at Ward level from each local authority. Where the authority was able to provide this data then this appears in the profiles. This data will only show children who are resident within the Authority AND are educated in State maintained schools located within the Authority.

The Royal Borough and West Berkshire were unable to provide this data so published Department for Education small area data was used. This data is based on the residence of the child and includes all State Maintained schools. This data is published at Lower Super Output Area level and was aggregated to Electoral Ward.

Health

The health data in the profiles is shown over two pages.

The first page shows health outcome data such as hospital admissions and deaths. Due to the large differences in these outcomes based on age and gender, these factors have been taken into account using a process call ‘indirect standardisation’. This takes data for a particular indicator (for example, deaths) from a reference population (England) split by age and gender. These figures are then applied to the population of the Ward in order to calculate what we would expect the death rates to be in the Ward. We can then compare the actual Ward value against the expected Ward value.

The second page looks at lifestyle data (obesity, binge drinking, and healthy eating). There were three stages to calculating Ward level data. These are summarised below;

• The original source is the individual level Health Survey for England data
• The results of the survey have then been calculated to MSOA level by the Association of Public Health Observatories (now under public health England). They modelled the Health Survey data to the local population using a number of variables such as age, ethnicity, gender, deprivation etc.
• These MSOA level estimates were then calculated to ward level for the Public Health England Local Health tool. They used weighted-populations to disaggregate from MSOA to ward level

Housing

All housing data was sourced from the Census 2011.

Community safety

All data was sourced from Thames Valley Police and is shown as a rate per 1,000 all age population.

Environment

The urban/rural classification of an area is provided by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

There are six urban/rural classifications; defined as follows:

• Major Urban: districts with either 100,000 people or 50 per cent of their population in urban areas with a population of more than 750,000

• Large Urban: districts with either 50,000 people or 50 per cent of their population in one of 17 urban areas with a population between 250,000 and 750,000

• Other Urban: districts with fewer than 37,000 people or less than 26 per cent of their population in rural settlements and larger market towns

• Significant Rural: districts with more than 37,000 people or more than 26 per cent of their population in rural settlements and larger market towns

• Rural-50: districts with at least 50 per cent but less than 80 per cent of their population in rural settlements and larger market towns

• Rural-80: districts with at least 80 per cent of their population in rural settlements and larger market towns

Land use statistics are provided from the General Land Use Database in square metres.

Domestic energy consumption is sourced from Office for National Statistics Neighbourhood Profiles and is shown in total megawatt hours over three years.

FAQs

The data are old, when will it be updated?

The data were the most recently available when the profiles were created. The data will be updated on an annual basis. It is unlikely that the majority of the data will change significantly year on year without intervention. You can ask yourself if anything has happened that would cause change in the data since the year of the data in the profiles. If so, it may be worth investigating further.

Why is there no data for my Ward?

Data will not have been included if numbers are less than five in order to protect individuals from being identified.

Why is my Ward better/worse than average?

As referred to throughout the user guide, we must be cautious when labelling an area ‘worse’ or ‘better’ when not using controls to eliminate chance variation in the data. The contextual data should be considered when thinking about why an area’s value may be higher or lower than the average.

What do we need to change?

The data in the profiles will not directly answer this question. The profiles are intended to give an overall picture of the Ward and to indicate what areas may need further investigation. A much deeper level of analysis and discussion would be needed to answer what needs to change. The profiles can be used to provoke this discussion.

Appendix 1: Small area data

We need to be cautious when drawing conclusions from data which has come from a small sample. This is because the data is less reliable in that it is more easily affected by chance variation which is not due to any measurable cause.

We can measure this chance variation using confidence intervals which are calculated using the size of the sample and a chosen level of confidence (usually 95%). This is illustrated in the table and chart below (data is fictional).

Although the percentage achieving 5 GCSEs for all areas is the same (50%) the confidence intervals show us that we can be more confident in the figures for Berkshire and for the local authority than we can be for the Ward level figure. For Berkshire we can be 95% confident that, allowing for chance variation, between 49% and 51% of children achieve 5 GCSEs. Within a Berkshire Electoral Ward, this range increases and we can be 95% confident that, allowing for chance variation, between 37% and 63% of children achieve 5 GCSEs.

Area	Percentage achieving 5 GCSE	Lower confidence interval	Upper confidence interval
Berkshire	50%	49%	51%
Berkshire Local Authority	50%	48%	52%
Berkshire Electoral Ward	50%	37%	63%

This becomes important when comparing two areas or two time periods as illustrated below. At first glance we would say that performance in the Ward (30%) is worse than the Berkshire average (50%). However, the range in which we can be confident the Ward value falls when allowing for chance variation is between 22% and 55%. The upper range is actually higher than the Berkshire average. Therefore, we would have to interpret this as the percentage of children in the Ward achieving 5 GCSEs being no different to the Berkshire average.

Area	Percentage achieving 5 GCSE	Lower confidence interval	Upper confidence interval
Berkshire	50%	49%	51%
Berkshire Local Authority	40%	37%	42%
Berkshire Electoral Ward	30%	22%	55%