From The Telegraph:
According to the league tables, published by the Department for Education, Hackney, in east London, had the worst record in the country. Just 43 per cent of children in Hackney, one of London’s most deprived boroughs, were placed with adoptive parents within one year. Among the other poor performers was Brent, on 52 per cent, Nottinghamshire on 55 per cent, and Derby and the East Riding of Yorkshire both on 57 per cent.
In York, however, 100 per cent of judged to be suitable for adoption children were placed with new families within one year. It was followed by South Tyneside on 96 per cent, Hartlepool on 95 per cent and Portsmouth and Windsor and Maidenhead on 94 per cent.
Hackney last and York first? That set alarm bells ringing, seeing as of how Hackney is a 'deprived' and 'diverse' borough of London and York is quite posh and white. All things being equal, we'd expect there to be more children up for adoption but fewer suitable sets of parents in the former and the opposite in the latter, so these two extremes are hardly surprising.
But does this theory stack up in practice? To find out, I downloaded the adoption and deprivation tables (see below) and compiled the [overall deprivation ranking] and the [percentage of children placed with adoptive parents within 12 months] for the 117 areas which appear in both tables and discovered that the coefficiant correlation is (only) 24%, i.e. the more deprived an area, the less likely a child is to be adopted within 12 months, which is what we expected.
Here's the table, click to enlarge:
So now we know.
Sources:
Department of Education Children in care and adoption performance tables
DCLG, Multiple Deprivation Tables, via The Guardian.
Tuesday 1 November 2011
Those adoption league tables
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15 comments:
\What do you think about http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2055925/An-odd-house-number-makes-500-richer--unless-live-number-13.html?
That is bizarre.
The article says that low numbers are worth more than high numbers, which is what we would expect because numbering usually starts at the end closest to 'the centre' i.e. from number 1 or 2 is a much shorter walk to the shops, the park etc than from number 10 or number 100 (although I would not expect the difference between number 1 and number 10 to be as high as what they say - £18,000).
But why odd is worth more than even is a mystery to me. Your guess is as good as mine.
Presumably because the lowest number is an odd number. If street numbering started at zero, my guess is that houses with even numbers would be worth more on average than houses with odd numbers.
D, that doesn't make sense either. Surely houses number 1 and 2 are opposite each other, thus equally close to 'the centre' and thus worth the same.
If there are an equal number of houses on each side, then the average of each side would be the same, but if there is an odd number, then the largest odd numbered house would be worth slightly less than the largest numbered odd house, in which case the average value of odd houses would be lower, not higher.
Extending the idea further, I'm pretty sure that if you took the house numbers and divided them by 3, you find that the houses where the remainder was 1 were the most valuable on average, followed by those with remainder 2, and those exactly divisible by 3 least valuable. It's really just an extension of the "lowest number nearest the centre" idea which you mentioned above. You can divide by bigger number and see the same principle at work.
On the point about even and odd houses being on opposite sides of the road, I think that what you say is true for most streets but there are exceptions. And they may be skewing the results.
For example I used to live on a road with a park on the opposite side of the road. As a result there were only odd-numbered houses on the street. And of course the park raised the value of those houses. It's unlikely that there are an equal number of even-numbered streets with parks to balance that effect out. Most single-sided streets would be odd only or odd-and-even-on-the-same-side, I would think.
Anyway just a guess and I don't know how large a sample was used for the research but if it was large enough, it would have included single-sided streets like the one I lived on, so I still think it likely there would be an average effect favouring odd numbers.
Why would the orphans of Hackney be limited to adoptive parents within the borough? Surely parents from Kensington and Chelsea are eligible to adopt too.
TDK, good question. That might explain why the correlation is quite low - perhaps a lot of the 'orphans' from Hackney are adopted by wealthier parents outside the borough.
D, excellent point re single sided streets. I'll have to think about the 'divide by 3'.
Deprived? They're not deprived of anything except work ethic.
It's York and Kensington that' deprived (of over half their income).
AC1
Not all streets are numbered regularly as you postulate. Some have the numbers running up one side and down the other. Some single sided streets have all the numbers on the one side, or if there's a gap for a school or a park, the numbering (odd or even) starts again the othe side of the gap so that No 24 is opposite No 9. I think it's all sheer coincidence apart from the "low numbers worth more" effect.
"Deprived? They're not deprived of anything except work ethic."
They're probably not even deprived of that, in that they didn't have it in the first place. Talking about poor people as "deprived" is stupid, as it assumes that they were once rich and some agency came along and took all their wealth away. It's just another damn euphemism. Fits well with Socialist "it's not my fault I'm poor" thinking, though.
AC1, B, lighten up a bit. You know what 'deprived' is used to mean in this context and those happened to be the first tables i could find.
But if you look at Prince Charles, is it his fault that he's rich?
I know what "deprived" is used to mean. I'm just saying it's a pretty stupid euphemism.
"But if you look at Prince Charles, is it his fault that he's rich?"
Well yes, he could give it all away and become a monk.
B, I was using 'deprived' in its Guardian-social worker do-gooder meaning. It may well be a stupid euphemism but it still has a meaning, which is quite relevant in the context of adoption.
As to people like Prince Charles or Camercleggiband, they hardly slogged their way up from the very bottom, did they?
No, that's why there's a moral case for them giving it all away. Although, to be fair, what Camercleggiband would probably most miss in the monastery would be the power rather than the money.
B, there's no case for them to give anything away, moral or otherwise; the moral case is for people in positions of power or political favour to stop constantly soaking up wealth from everybody else.
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