The National Travel Survey (NTS) is considered a world-leading and gold-standard travel survey, with governments from many other countries using the NTS as a template for their own travel surveys. It has been running for over 50 years which is great as it captures long term trends, but modern travel trends are evolving fast (Uber […]
Learn moreHousing and planning statistics play a vital role in helping to inform decision-making of all kinds across the UK. In January I blogged about the progress made in joining up statisticians across departments and the devolved administrations – both at an operational and strategic level. I reflected on the balance between driving forward improvements whilst […]
Learn moreIf anyone knew the power of harmonisation, they did. Harmonisation is an often misunderstood and sometimes underappreciated idea. People often think it is just about getting everyone to use exactly the same definitions and concepts in their statistics. Some think it’s just about adding emotional impact to a melody. But these are just two aspects […]
Learn moreWhat is synthetic data, and how can it be used for public good? This was the question asked at a recent event at the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Synthetic data are artificially generated data that have the look and structure of real data, but do not contain any information on individuals. They also contain […]
Learn moreA few weeks ago, we celebrated the first birthday of the new Code of Practice for Statistics. You may have seen the blog post from John Pullinger, the National Statistician, or the one from Steve Ellerd-Elliott, the statistical Head of Profession at the Department for Work and Pensions. These talked about the new code and […]
Learn moreThe Best Practice and Impact (BPI) division based at the Office for National Statistics (ONS), provides a range of services for the whole Government Statistical Service (GSS) to help improve official statistics. One service we offer is free consultancy. This can be tailored to any challenges or obstacles your department faces. Recently, the Quality Centre in […]
Learn moreThe Code of Practice for Statistics is one year old today. This is real cause for celebration. Our new code reframes the debate about statistics. The statistician is not just a calculator. Rather, the statistician’s job is at the heart of democracy. As David Norgrove states in his introduction to the code: statistics are a […]
Learn moreI am pleased to be saying happy first birthday to the Code of Practice for Statistics. Over the last twelve months I have been involved in many different conversations about the use of statistics and I have found the new code to be really helpful in supporting these. As the statistical Head of Profession in […]
Learn moreMy name is Kin-Chung OW and I have just completed a two week secondment with the GSS Good Practice Team (GPT) from the Department for Education, working on a case study on Reproducible Analytical Pipelines (RAP) in R. If you are not familiar with RAP, do not worry! You are not alone. This was an area […]
Learn moreIn the Data Visualisation team at ONS, we have undertaken a project to review the way we write chart titles and we thought it would be good to share our experience in blog for the Government Statistical Service (GSS). What’s the idea? Currently, many of the chart titles used by the ONS and across the GSS are […]
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