This is Part II of a two-part blogpost. Part I talks about the process of developing the visualization below and Part II discusses the insights gleaned from the product.
Discussion:
- It is interesting to note that Paya Lebar and Boon Lay area does not have any primary school.
- The average number of places taken up till Phase 2B across the 190 primary schools is 109. There are 19 schools that are oversubscribed (i.e. 200 placements and above). There are more girls' schools (15) than boys' schools (9) in Singapore, which leads to more boys' school being oversubscribed. However, the percentage of girls' school and boys' school being under-subscribed (i.e. below 100) is rather similar at 40% and 33% respectively. This shows that perhaps the perception across the girls' schools is more homogeneous than that of the boys' school.
- 7 out of 19 schools that are oversubscribed are not located beside train stations. The vicinity could probably face greater traffic jams during the morning hours where there could be more parents sending their kids to school. Even though these schools are not near any train stations, the popularity is not affected.
- Having the population of kids aged 7-12 for each area will be useful in understanding the geospatial distribution in choice of schools and urban planning.
[Edited 1/1/18] We can also draw inspiration from a case study in Boston for policy analysis. Boston had decided to promote more kids walking to school, so the policy stated that students who applied to schools within their walk zone (1 mile for elementary school, 1.5 miles for middle school, 2 miles for high school) would be given higher priority in the school selection process. It’s only in the implementation, a basic web app that allows you to enter your address and the age of your kids and maps the schools in the radius (taking in a few other eligibility factors), that the edge cases appeared. And it’s only in working with users (in this case the parents) that the flaws in the policy appeared, like student homes that were 1.5 miles from the school as the crow flies, but many more miles of actual walking because the route crossed, say, the Boston Harbor. Making these and other use cases visible — to parents and to school department officials — made it much easier to understand where the policy needed adjusting (Source). It would certainly be interesting to explore if this is the case for Singapore as well.
Alternatively, click here to view/ download the interactive Tableau dashboard.
Dataset to build the dashboard available here.