A glance at a public view
What do 500 members of the public think about the future of education? What do they hope for and what are they concerned about? A first (small) insight to all you avid BCH Blog readers of some of the comments that have come back as part of a 500 strong demographically sampled ‘Citizens Panel’ – when they were asked to comment on a range of issues about educational futures.
The Citizens Panel is made up of members of the public who have been sampled against a number of different demographic characteristics. Their views, along with those of the Citizens Council, will be used to reflect (not represent) a public perception of the possible futures described elsewhere within BCH and to comment upon how ‘education’ should respond. The responses have only come into the lab this week – so a first view of the overall comments through TagCrowd. These are the words most commonly used. Make of it what you will. We’ll be doing detailed analysis over the next few weeks in order to inform the scenarios, but a flavour for you to mull over the weekend.
As with many tag clouds, the larger the word, the more it is used – so in this case, the larger the word, the more times the word has been used by the Citizen’s Panel. Some of the key words are expected, relating to the question prompts – these are simply contextual words. It is interesting to look at the words used at second/third level of frequency. To see what terms are being used, what issues are raised regularly. The warning, of course, is that this is not research analysis; this is not providing any context for the word use, but that by looking at the span of words and the regularity, it provokes some thought about the issues being raised.
Some interesting words to look out for with the Children’s Plan in mind: parents, health, happiness, safety, success and jobs.
Just worth a browse before we get into the detail of reflecting the Citizens Panel’s perceptions about educational futures.
