Return to Nappy Valley: Tower Hamlets, a tale of two boroughs

I have returned to my investigations into the 'Nappy Valley' phenomenon, which as discussed in previous posts is the perceived disappearance of children (and their parents) from Wapping as they approach school age.

I previously found that Wapping's population distribution appeared to support this perception, but I have been curious what the cause of this is. I will move on at some point to look at school performance but I need to do some background reading to get a better grip on the education system.

What I have got my hands on is a data set showing the population distribution for different ethnic groups across Tower Hamlets as a whole dating back to 2001 and forward projected to 2031. There are a number of different ethnic/racial groups but I have focused here only on 'White' and 'Bangladeshi' as together they account for around 85% of the population in Tower Hamlets and the remainder of the population is divided into a number of other groups. 'White' here includes all 'white' groups and does not refer to an ethnic, but a racial group.

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Language of Learning

To try and understand the 'Nappy Valley' phenomenon, I have been looking at data on the schools in the area. One of the data fields I have, is the proportion of school pupils for whom English is not their main language.

From the census I know that 34% of residents in Tower Hamlets do not think of English as being their main language, so I was a little surprised that 77.5% of pupils in Tower Hamlets state primary schools do not speak English as their main language- this is over twice the level of the general population. In St Katharine's and Wapping ward in 2011, 72% of the population speak English as their main language, yet in the schools (albeit a slightly wider area), only 20% of children speak English as their main language.

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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 London	All Wards	7.4%
Camden	West Hampstead	10.0%
Kensington and Chelsea	Earl's Court	9.2%
Kensington and Chelsea	Hans Town	9.8%
Kensington and Chelsea	Royal Hospital	9.9%
Merton	Hillside	9.4%
Southwark	Riverside	9.9%
Southwark	Surrey Docks	9.5%
Tower Hamlets	St Katharine's and Wapping	9.5%
Wandsworth	East Putney	9.8%
Wandsworth	Fairfield	8.1%
Wandsworth	Shaftesbury	8.5%
Westminster	Bayswater	9.0%
Westminster	Bryanston and Dorset Square	8.8%
Westminster	Lancaster Gate	8.3%
Westminster	Marylebone High Street	8.1%
Westminster	Tachbrook	8.7%
Westminster	Warwick	8.5%
Westminster	West End	6.8%

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 Wapping	45.5%
Millwall	40.9%
Blackwall and Cubitt Town	33.9%
Bow East	23.0%
Spitalfields and Banglatown	18.3%
Bow West	17.7%
Limehouse	17.6%
Shadwell	17.5%
Whitechapel	17.0%
Mile End East	10.8%
Weavers	9.6%
Bromley-by-Bow	9.1%
Bethnal Green South	8.8%
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!