School Census - Youth-Transitions/resources GitHub Wiki

Background

School Census is a termly collection of data about pupils in maintained education in England and Wales. Prior to 2006, School Census was known as PLASC (Pupil Level Annual School Census) and collected annually.

In LEO, School Census is provided as a series of views, one for each termly or annual census, and covers only schools in England.

In addition to the main School Census, you may also have (one view for each):

• PRU Census, which provided details of pupils on roll in Pupil Referral Units (PRUs) between 2010 and 2013, after which PRUs were included in School Census.
• Alternative Provision (AP) Census, which provides details of pupils who are funded by local authorities but who are educated outside the state-funded school (mainstream, special, AP) sector.

Processing

Since using the School Census data for any longitudinal analysis would involve a large number of source tables, we typically load all the School Census tables we will be using for a LEO project (plus PRU Census and AP Census tables) into a single table, using the fft.census_details.sql script.

You may need to adapt this script depending on which data items you have access to for your project.

Example uses

We use the data provided in School Census for three main purposes:

• To select cohorts to study
• To create school history measures (e.g. age first observed with special educational needs (SEN), % of terms eligible for free school meals)
• To extract the dates between which pupils were on roll in the state-school system.