CensusAtSchool 10 Latest

You can download an MS Word copy of the latest CensusAtSchool 10 results featured here: CensusAtSchool 10 Latest Results

At the time of writing, early May 2011, there were 22599 responses from male (46%) and female (54%) learners with age range 11 to 18 inclusive.

“What is your favourite football team?” is a question asked in both Phase 1 (2000 – 2001) and Phase 10 (2010 – 2011) and in the Parents and Guardians questionnaire in Phase 10.

More children support football teams in Phase 10 than in Phase 1 (79 % in Phase 1, 81 % in Phase 10.) 
In both samples Manchester United is the most popular team but learners’ support for this team seems to have declined more then others in the last 10 years.

Teams that seem to have gain children’s support in the last 10 years are Portsmouth, Chelsea, Arsenal, Stoke City and Manchester City. 

However, this chart may be misleading because of the differences between the numbers of responses from the different regions of England. Most responses were from learners in the South of England (11314 responses).  The number of responses from the North of England and the Midlands were 5215 and 5332 respectively.

The regional bar graph shows that, for this sample in Phase 10, Manchester United is the most popular football team in all three of the regions with Arsenal being more popular in the South then it is in the North and Midlands.

Phase 9 asked which subjects pupils would like removed from the English school curriculum.  The results are surprising with most boys and most girls wanting to remove Religious Education with Mathematics coming third.  In Phase 10 we asked both learners and their parents to state their favourite subject at school. The results are displayed in the percentage bar chart below.

Maths and English are ranked the seventh and eighth favourite subject by children whereas parents and guardians have ranked these as second and third respectively.  
The scatter diagram of open arm span against height for the 23226 learners’ responses (some responses haven been removed due to errors) to Phase 10 has an interesting shape and a number of interpretations are possible.

Although there is a positive correlation between the sample data of the two variables, there is a great deal of variation for many fixed open arm spans and many fixed heights.

There also seems to be a second weaker correlation where learners appear to have only measured half their arm span instead of the full open span. For example, there are a large number of learners with recorded arm span between 50 and 100cm but with heights about twice those measurements.

Learners and their parents selected the favourite way they keep up with the news.  Male parents in the sample (5514 total responses) prefer to read a newspaper (29%) or watch the news (45%) on the television, whereas female parents (8388 total responses), boys (10602 total responses) and girls (12603 total responses) seem to prefer to watch the news on the television (53%, 51% and 42% respectively).  It is interesting that some learners do read a newspaper and that girls like to keep up with the news by talking to friends.

These early results show that boys like sports’ news whereas girls like to keep up with entertainment news.

Although, the boys who keep up with the news by reading newspapers are most interested in the sport section (54%) and the largest percentage of the girls in entertainment news (30%), this is not the whole story (815 girls, 1002 boys).  Forty one percent of girls who are most interested in keeping up with entertainment news prefer to do this by watching television.

Learners enjoy watching comedy on the television the most.  Also there seems to be differences between what girls and boys enjoy watching except when it comes to films.

With the 2012 Olympics approaching children were asked to choose the Olympic sport they most liked to watch.  The following table shows the Olympic sports in which the UK won medals in 2008 and, in order of popularity, the learners’ favourite sports to watch.

The bar chart shows how the boys and girls in the sample differ in their favourite Olympic sports.

Census Day was the 27 March 2011.  Children and parents were asked ‘During which month is Census Day?’  The bar chart below shows that 66% of learners and 68% of parents were correct.