ONS has received the 2005 'Best New Information from Government Award' from the Demographics User Group (DUG) for the National Statistics Output Area (OA) Classification. The award was won jointly with the University of Leeds, which worked in partnership with ONS through Dan Vickers, a PhD student who carried out much of the technical work.
Factors which contributed to the award were that the classification had UK coverage when much output is available only for parts of the UK, the UK datasets on which the classification is based are accessible and freely downloadable, and it is part of a hierarchical classification based on Census results that complements commercial alternatives based on other sources. It is an example of drawing a simple but telling picture from a complex set of data.
See the classifications in the new quick pictures section of the ONS 2001 Census website, and more information about the Demographic User Group.
The OA Classification provides the opportunity to structure and help analysis of other National Statistics datasets by exploring relationships between area type and other population characteristics, and work is already in hand to make the classification available with survey data.
The work on the classification has also been a good example of partnership - with academic partners and between ONS Divisions - bringing together ONS Sources,ONS Geography, Methodology, Regional and Analysis expertise, as well as input from GRO(Scotland) and NISRA (Northern Ireland).
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