The Department has developed the Local Area Interactive Tool (LAIT) to provide easy access to a wide range of data related to children and young people sourced from various departments across government. It acts as a single central evidence base that helps support the Accountability Framework and Transparency Agenda.
The LAIT is an Excel-based tool that provides user-friendly access to a system that brings together a consistent set of local authority (LA) performance and data items including:
- inspectorate judgements
- contextual information about individual LAs, including number and type of schools, social deprivation factors
- pupil attainment, health, looked-after children, post-16, etc.
The LAIT includes baseline and time-series data for more than 180 different data items allowing comparisons to be made both over time and, for benchmarking purposes, against national, regional and statistical neighbour groups. The information is presented in interactive tables and charts with the LA's rank and quartile position included to indicate performance in the national context. The LAIT data is continuously updated when new data is released so that users always have access to the very latest information.
The tool is authored in Excel version 2003. If you are experiencing viewing or visual basic issues (these include run time errors from visual basic), please ask your technical team to upgrade to the 2003 version of Excel or download Excel Viewer from Microsoft. Please note: looking at the tool through Excel Viewer will limit its functionality. If you already have Excel 2003, to view the tool correctly please download and save it to your computer.
Contact Darlington Bridge if you have any queries you would like to raise with regard to the content of the tool or its operation.
Contact details
Darlington Bridge
Email: Darlington.BRIDGE@education.gsi.gov.uk
