Active Essex, in partnership with Essex County Council and Thurrock Council, delivers the Essex Activate Holiday Activity and Food (HAF) programme on behalf of the Department for Education.
This initiative provides free holiday activities and nutritious meals to support the physical and mental wellbeing of primary and secondary school children, especially those from low-income families.
The programme runs during Easter, summer and winter breaks (with additional support throughout half-term where possible) and is targeted at children eligible for income related free school meals – with local funding extending the offer to low-income families.
In 2023 alone, the Essex Activate programme reached over 10,000 unique children on income related free school meals through holiday activities.
Ensuring that the programme reaches where need is highest is a key focus for Active Essex – which is why the organisation relies on Local Insight to locate community need and effectively target their provision.
Bash Mahmood, Relationship Development Officer for South Essex at Active Essex, took us through the ways that Local Insight has contributed to their work.
Bash shared that before the team had access to Local Insight, they faced several challenges in planning and targeting their HAF provision.
To start with, identifying the communities with the highest level of need wasn’t easy. The team used static maps and spreadsheets to create heat maps, and would spend time processing data indicators such as ‘income-related free school meal eligibility’, ‘levels of deprivation’ and ‘income deprivation’ affecting children.
This manual approach was time-consuming and lacked flexibility. Every year, maps would have to be recreated, and manually combining data from multiple sources in Excel, which left room for human error and made it hard to spot smaller pockets of need.
With limited resources, Active Essex had to decide how to distribute HAF funding across various districts – but without an easy way to compare up-to-date data across areas, their decisions were based on the best available (but sometimes outdated) information.
It was difficult to quickly pinpoint, for example, a ward where many eligible children weren’t being reached, or to see if some areas had more provision than necessary.
Using specialised mapping software and completing extensive data manipulation for every report proved challenging – and so, Active Essex recognised a need to streamline this process.
For them, an ideal solution would be accessible, provide up-to-date community data and would save time on data analysis.
Local Insight gave Active Essex a user-friendly way to complete their data analysis, allowing the team to visualise and explore community need without needing to be QGIS experts.
Instead of static maps, they could now view interactive maps layered with the latest data, allowing them to explore key metrics such as the percentage of children on income-related free school meals, obesity rates, and Universal Credit claimants at a local level.
With access to the tool, one team member stated that Local Insight “gives us the data and analysis to ensure our services are underpinned by the best possible knowledge of local communities, leveraging the power of information right across the organisation.”
By putting the data at Active Essex’s fingertips, Local Insight is saving time and money by eliminating the need to manually gather and update multiple datasets.
An example of data visualisation used by Active Essex: the map shows the distribution of pupils eligible for ‘income-related free school meals’ by ward (yellow/brown areas indicate higher numbers of children). Local Insight enables the team to view maps like this interactively, zooming into specific communities and layering multiple indicators to identify high-need areas.
In addition to the indicators included and maintained by OCSI, Active Essex has used the Services feature in Local Insight to support the HAF programme.
They uploaded the locations of HAF clubs, schools and other services onto the map, each tagged with relevant details such as the holiday period and capacity.
This meant that at the click of a button, staff could see where existing clubs were located and overlay that with key data – offering a comprehensive look at how service provision matched up with need.
Alongside Services, Essex Activate brought in their own locally held data through Local Insight’s Custom Data module.
By bringing in datasets like ‘number of children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities by school’, or figures showing the levels of attendance by children to HAF programmes, Active Essex could make comparisons to OCSI-held data and better inform their strategic decisions.
The team used Local Insight to compare provision against need in creative ways. By mapping the home addresses of children attending HAF clubs, they could see how far families were travelling. In certain locations there were clubs that brought children from 9 – 10 miles away, suggesting that some areas had to travel far to find a holiday club.
This allows Active Essex to work to create new clubs closer to those communities, balancing the spread of provision.
The team also overlaid crime data, looking specifically at anti-social behaviour, to find the neighbourhoods where activities for young people could have a positive impact. They discovered a hotspot in Canvey Island, where ongoing work by a local youth project was taking place – which they could then provide additional support to.
Local Insight has since become a one-stop shop for Active Essex’s planning data. Rather than juggling static maps and spreadsheets, staff can open up the Local Insight Dashboard and immediately drill down into the areas they’re interested in. The platform identifies the areas with high, medium or low values on chosen indicators, making it easy to find priority areas for intervention at a glance.
Adopting Local Insight has had a significant impact on how Active Essex delivers the HAF programme – which contributes to a more efficient use of limited funding.
The data revealed, for instance, that some schools with very high free school meal eligibility had relatively low HAF engagement – which is eye-opening, and can immediately be acted on with targeted communications, and meetings with these schools to better understand the reasons behind these figures.
Active Essex has also since started producing locality-specific ‘Provider Insight Packs’ for each district, summarising key indicators (like the number of FSM-eligible children, local demographics and past HAF uptake) and mapping out where provision exists.
These packs have become a valuable tool for on-the-ground partners and decision-makers. For example, providers running holiday clubs can easily see heat maps of eligible children in their area and the locations of schools and existing clubs.
One provider noted that the heat maps were “great for venue planning,” clearly showing where the clusters of eligible families are. Having this information in a clear visual format helps providers choose club locations that are convenient and accessible for the target families. Others commented that “the data is valuable information and clearly communicated,” helping them to target specific schools for promotion and even leverage extra funding to expand their offerings.
In practical terms, a coordinator can find schools with a high number of FSM pupils but low HAF attendance, and then reach out to its administrators – one person said it was “helpful to know the best schools to contact and [we] can use the numbers to ‘promote’ clubs” and encourage schools to support the initiative.
Active Essex are now working on Locality Insight Packs, which combine locality-level datasets, and include ward-level breakdowns with participation and funding allocations and key delivery figures – such as ‘meals distributed’ or ‘number of children engaged’ in the past the year.
The aim is to use these packs as a tool to:
The team has also begun using the platform to support a new Sport and Youth Mental Health project – a county-wide effort to improve young people’s mental wellbeing through sport and activity.
Approximately 36,000 young people in Essex (aged 5 to 18) are experiencing low levels of emotional wellbeing, with around 1 in 5 facing a mental health problem. The project aims to prevent children and young people from reaching the point where prolonged clinical treatment becomes necessary.
The team is again using Local Insight to overlay data that identifies gaps and opportunities for targeted delivery. These insights are already informing decisions about resource allocation and grant funding for mental health projects.
Visit the Active Essex website for further details about their work.
Book a demo of Local Insight to:
As we enter the UK’s summer months, we’re looking at the ways…
More
Local Insight is now hosting over 330 new indicators from Scotland’s 2022…
More
Data from Scotland’s 2022 Census has been published at Output Area level,…
More
