Nappy Valley 2

I was looking at the population structure of Wapping compared to LBTH, and London. I thought it would be interesting to identify other wards with a similar demographic structure to Wapping to see what shared characteristics there might be as part of my quest to understand the Nappy Valley situation.

For all London wards I calculated the proportion of the population that was a school aged child (5-19). A few statistics of note:
  • Taking the average of 625 wards gives an average school age proportion of the population to be 17.1%
  • The median proportion of the population that are school age is 17.4%
  • If you take the population of London as a whole, 17.2 percent of the population are school age.
  • The highest is 27.8% (Fieldway in Croydon)
  • The lowest is 6.8% ('West End' in Westminster)
  • Wapping at 9.5% is in the second percentile (i.e. 98 per cent of wards have proportionately more children)
Wapping is clearly at one extreme, so I filtered for all wards in London with fewer than 10% of the population of school age. This gave me 19 wards in 7 boroughs. The list and the proportion of the population of school age children are shown below:


City of LondonAll Wards7.4%
CamdenWest Hampstead10.0%
Kensington and ChelseaEarl's Court9.2%
Kensington and ChelseaHans Town9.8%
Kensington and ChelseaRoyal Hospital9.9%
MertonHillside9.4%
SouthwarkRiverside9.9%
SouthwarkSurrey Docks9.5%
Tower HamletsSt Katharine's and Wapping9.5%
WandsworthEast Putney9.8%
WandsworthFairfield8.1%
WandsworthShaftesbury8.5%
WestminsterBayswater9.0%
WestminsterBryanston and Dorset Square8.8%
WestminsterLancaster Gate8.3%
WestminsterMarylebone High Street8.1%
WestminsterTachbrook8.7%
WestminsterWarwick8.5%
WestminsterWest End6.8%

However, just because these areas all have relatively few school age children doesn't mean they're similar - it could be that they have a very large number of pensioners for example, skewing things, so I plotted a chart:


There appears to be a strong visual correlation between these wards with perhaps the exception of 'Hans Town' and 'Royal Hospital' which show less of a spike in young adults, but do show the same lack of children (as is expected given the basis for selection). However, looking just at the school age section, we can see these wards are all tightly packed, though some don't show the same steep drop.

I tested the goodness of fit of Wapping against this subset using categories of 5-9,10-14, 15-19 and 'other' to see if the profile of young people is consistent. This gives a p value of 0.063, which in simple terms means that at the 95% confidence level that these other wards are a good fit with Wapping.

I also looked at what I will refer to as the 'drop-off', that is, the percentage drop in the number of the population aged 5-9 compared to aged 0-4:
  • Median drop-off is 17.9%, average is 17.2
  • Wapping is in the top 1.3 percent in London with a drop off of 45.5%
  • Looking just at Tower Hamlets, there are 3 Wards - Wapping and the two Isle of Dogs wards, which have a much greater level of drop-off
So there appears to not only be fewer children, but that there are fewer school age children compared to the number of toddlers.
Drop-off
St Katharine's and Wapping45.5%
Millwall40.9%
Blackwall and Cubitt Town33.9%
Bow East23.0%
Spitalfields and Banglatown18.3%
Bow West17.7%
Limehouse17.6%
Shadwell17.5%
Whitechapel17.0%
Mile End East10.8%
Weavers9.6%
Bromley-by-Bow9.1%
Bethnal Green South8.8%
St Dunstan's and Stepney Green
7.4%
Mile End and Globe Town
3.3%
Bethnal Green North
3.2%
East India and Lansbury
-2.7%


So next stage is to start understanding what it is that is a) driving the exodus and b) pulling in the youngsters, and then find out if the wards I have identified have anything in common - looks like I best get some datasets out!
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