How The STHC Still Provides Meaningful Analysis Results Even In The Absence Of Pupil Usual Mode of Travel Data
The Pupil Travel Distance & Mode Analysis Module "quantifies how far pupils travel to schools within the authority, from where, by what means & the carbon & calorie footprints of the pupil journeys".
Obviously some of these questions can only be answered if Pupil Usual Mode of Travel (PUMoT) data has been collected by the school and passed on to us for analysis along with their national School Census data. If there is no usual mode of travel data for a pupil we record their mode as Unknown (UNK). We can still undertake spatial analysis as the pupils location comes from their postcode in the School Census, however:-
- distance results can't be broken down by travel mode.
- carbon & calorie footprints can't be calulated for the journeys.
Undoubtedly the STHC analysis output is less rich without the results being broken down by pupil usual mode of travel, however it still contains much useful intelligence information that gives insight into the pupil travel situation in individual schools. For example:-
- home location of all pupils attending the school visualised as both anonymised "heatmap" style maps and individual icons.
- total and average "actual" travel distance.
- the number of pupils living within a realistic walking distance (the "Walk Threshold").
- the number of pupils attending the school for whom it is their their nearest eligible School etc.
Thus the STHC shows that, even in the absence of Pupil Usual Mode of Travel data, meaningful, pupil-level results can still be derived from spatial analysis of core National School Census data and other publicly available datasets.
That said, the STHC Data Portal makes the case for collecting Pupil Usual Mode of Travel data within school management systems self-evident when viewers see how much more useful it makes the analysis results to them.