Social Index Explorer
Leading the way in turning data into actionable insight, Barking and Dagenham's Insight Hub have created the world's first Social Progress Index (SPI) at a ward level. Using local data, knowledge and advanced statistical techniques the data science team have worked closely with the Social Progress Imperative to create the SPI at Ward level. This is allowing Barking and Dagenham to measure social progress at a very granular level, enabling the measurement of key pillars of social progress looking at basic human needs, foundations of wellbeing and opportunity for our residents.
Barking and Dagenham are measuring in a very real way the borough's vision of No One Left Behind. Ensuring that progress is made across the borough and that all residents have access to education, health care and oportunities to succeed.
Video
The following video sets the background scene of Barking and Dagenham, how we developed the world's first ward level SPI and what our vision is for the future of this tool.
Testimonials
Michael Green is the Chief Executive of the Social Progress Imperative. Michael and his team have worked with us as a methodological partner.
“LBBD is the first local authority in the world to have built a SPI at the level of granularity of the ward. This is an outstanding innovation in the use of the Index that they now plan to scale in the UK. This innovation was an initiative of the council who approached the Imperative having learned about the Index to see if it could be harnessed to support the Borough's Plans. Our experience globally is that such projects require committed local partners who will commit their own resources and want to drive the project. LBBD clearly met this requirement. Their Index has pioneered the use of administrative data with other data to bring the comparative measure of social progress to a local level. LBBD also innovated in data visualisation and is already developing new ways of using the data to support policy and programme design, and for dialogue between the council, residents and stakeholders. We are optimistic that we will see a clear case study of how the Social Progress Index can impact spending and policy decisions to have a real, positive impact on people’s lives. LBBD’s work has even peaked global interest and as a result we fully endorse this application to MHCLG.”
Councillor Saima Ashraf is the Deputy leader of Barking and Dagenham Council and the cabinet member of Community Leadership and Engagement.
"the Insight team have taken our ambition of "no-one left behind" and have made it into a very real and useful tool. "No-one left behind" means different things to different stakeholders and what the team have done is captured the very real social issues that we face as a borough and given us a tool to track our progress every year. For me the ease of use is key; data can be a very difficult subject area to understand but what the team has done is create a tool that provides insight in an instant at our own fingertips. As a ward councillor, the ward indexes, yearly comparisons and coloured progress ratings clearly illustrates where our attention and efforts should be for our residents."
Andy Ginn is the Associate Pro Vice Chancellor for Coventry University London (The Borough's Local University).
"CU London, a wholly owned educational subsidiary of Coventry University Group, opened it's doors at the fomer Civic Centre in the Borough of Barking and Dagenham in September 2017. The University Group is a high performing one; (TEF Gold rated, Times University of the Year 2019 for student experience, and the highest placed modern university in the Times 'table of tables'), but crucially has a strong reputation for widening participation through it's 'life-shaped' learning model.
CU London enrolled nearly 500 students in year 1, and is on track for rapid growth, targeting 1100 students in year 2 (2018-19), to 3500 students by year 6 (2022-23). Key to this is in our work engaging meaningfully with core communities, business and individuals in Barking and Dagenham, which has already won us praise by UPP in their research to identify best practice in universities fulfilling their 'civic' role. To this end, the Data Explorer has already proven invaluable in ensuring that we make the right strategic and operational decisions at the right time, which of course are meaningful enablers of real social inclusion, empowerment and progress. This tool has huge potential and CU London fully supports LBBD’s bid to MHCLG."
Dr Joseph Bailey is the Leader of the Data Science Team at Future Cities Catapult a government supported centre for the advancement of smart cities.
“Future Cities Catapult have been working with LBBD since 2017 with a goal to enabling cities to make better information driven decisions. In part stimulated by our collaboration on the Tombolo project - which sought to enable the combination of different kinds of urban data for use in modelling, LBBD have brought the Social Progress Indicator to life through engaging visualisation and an open accessible methodology. We believe that the Social Progress Index has the capacity to generate positive impact in UK cities and are supportive of this bid to MHCLG"
Saffron Woodcraft leads the Institue of Global Prosperity at UCL's work on cities, leading cross-sector partnerships with government, public agencies, business and communities to re-think what sustainable urban prosperity means and to develop new citizen-led measures of prosperity
"IGP at UCL has been collaborating with LBBD since 2016 to develop new citizen-led prosperity metrics to inform neighbourhood-level priorities in the Borough. This initiative has been developed alongside the ward-level SPI - together the two projects are highly innovative uses of data to inform decision-making. Working with the LBBD team it is evident they are pioneering innovative uses of data, research methods and data visualisation. On behalf of the IGP at UCL, I strongly endorse this application to the MHCLG."