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Shiremoor Playground Adventure Trust - Understanding the importance of park facilities
 

Shiremoor Adventure Playground is a community-based, inclusive adventure playground, catering for children and young people of all abilities. The playground is owned and managed by North Tyneside Council which works in partnership with Shiremoor Adventure Playground Trust. Above description taken from: Shiremoor Adventure Playground Trust (shiremoor-adventure-playground-trust.org)

The request

The charity would like to prove the hypothesis that the park is still an important facility and is still being used by more deprived communities, giving an outlet for families and children to be more active and away from technology. The charity support on two main areas:

  • Understand their existing playground users data (from surveys conducted in the park), enriched with open source population data from ONS and North Tyneside Council.

  • Advise on what data should be collected going forward, best practices and how to do this.

The approach

To provide this insight a geospatial solution was created to visualise various demographic metrics of the regions surrounding the park, park visitor data was overlayed to provide insight into what areas visitors were arriving from. This solution included an interactive dashboard that depicted the anonymised data provided by Shiremoor Playground Trust overlayed with demographic population data. The solution was delivered using the open source geospatial visualisation tool QGIS and included Office of National Statistics (ONS) and census data at Local Super Output Area (LSOA) level to create a variety of choropleth maps that visualised the following data of surrounding regions:
  • Multiple deprivation index
  • Employment
  • Childhood obesity
  • Physical activity

The result

Throughout this process the charity better understood the usage of their adventure playground to help the development strategy for the playground in the future. This work enabled a data driven approach to identifying areas that the park should target to reach out to children most in need.

The project also provided the charity with data-led insight to support their funding applications.

We also discussed potential data collection methods to enable more effective data collection of park users for greater insight in the future.

Impact and benefits 

"Working with Statisticians for Society was really beneficial for Shiremoor APT. We knew we had data that we weren’t making best use of and we were keen to improve; we needed help with focusing on what we collect and how we use it effectively.

Peter did a fantastic job, he helped us define what we needed, asked good questions about what data was necessary and what systems would work for us ‘on the ground’. Peter checked in as he was working on the project, showed his progress and made sure it was fit for purpose. He was really helpful, interested in the work we do and in supporting our development.

The project has given us the evidence to show funders the impact and reach of our work and we have already used it successfully with funding bids. It has also led to us working more closely with other community groups in the surrounding area as it illustrated that our geographical reach was greater than initially thought and has helped us develop new partnerships; all of which ultimately benefits the communities we were set up to support."