INVESTIGATIVE DATA TEAM

School absence

in DenmarkBY THE INVESTIGATIVE DATA TEAM

Editor: Katrine Birkedal Frichkbir@dr.dk

INVESTIGATIVE DATA TEAM

From June the 10th to June the 13th 2014 the Investigative Data Team at Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) published more than 30 articles and interac-tive graphics about pupil absence in primary schools in Denmark at dr.dk.The theme was based on data concerning absence due to illness, authorised ab-sence and unauthorised absence at every class at every school in every municipality in Denmark. The data have never been published before.

The reason the data never have been published is, that the authority (the Ministry of Education) was unwilling to share this information with the public. But after a strug-gle of 7 month we managed to get the data (see more details regarding acquiring data at last page).

All articles and interactive graphics are available here:http://www.dr.dk/Nyheder/Tema/2014/skolefravaer/Forside.htm

The Data Journalism Awards (DJA) competition, organized by the Global Editors Network

Entry by DR’s Investigative Data Team

School absence in Denmark

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Presenting data to the readers

In the image up to four individual ele-ments can be viewed at a time. The user can add and edit each element to show data from a specific school or a specific class on a school or choose to show the average for a region or even the whole

country. Since all data are available in the same file, elements can be added or changed immediately, requiring no new data loads.The data from all of Denmark’s 1.350 public schools is collated and formatted

as JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) in one main file that is loaded with the main page. The script utilizes d3.js (an open source framework for data visual-ization - http://d3js.org/) to render a dynamically generated SVG file.

Find your child’s class at school and check out the absence – and compare

School absence in Denmark

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Making it work on mobileHalf of our readers use their smartphone rather than computer when they read news at dr.dk. Therefore we made all data avail-able in a modified version of the graphic.

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More data… We collected data on the parents’ aver-age income for all public Danish schools and plotted it against three types of absence, as defined by the Ministry of Education; illness, authorised absence and unauthorised absence. By letting the user interact with 1) the

Does the parents’ income affect the likelihood of Danish schoolchildren skipping school?

type of absence and 2) the D3-generat-ed scatter –plot of the schools, the vis-ualization allowed for both an overview of the overall pattern and exploration of the outlier schools. The interactive display is a JavaScript implementation.

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Even more data… A survey among 400 Danish primary schools shows that there are some schools where students feel more bullied that at other schools. We found it interesting to compare these results

with our data regarding schools with a high frequency of absence. The analy-sis showed that if you compare the 25 schools with most bullying with the 25 schools with less bullying, the schools

with most bullying have two more days of absence a year per student – and one more day of illness a year per student.

Does bullying have an impact on absence?

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Even more data… We didn’t stop our research and articles with data about absence and patents income. In addition to the data about days of absence we wanted to hear the adults, who are responsible for the education of the children: Parents and principals.

Surveys to the principals of the public schools and to the parents of children in public school provided data on the two parties’ opinions on the student ab-sence as well as interesting cases. Every public school principal in the country – around 1.350 - received the

survey that was distributed through the survey program SurveyXact. 251 prin-cipals answered the questionnaire. The private organization Skole & Forældres magazine Skolebørn (School & Parents magazine Schoolchildren) distributed the survey to the parents on behalf of The Danish Broadcasting Corporation via email. Approximately 11.000 parents – who all subscribed to the magazines newsletter – received the survey and 1.474 participated.

The two questionnaires focused on the principals and the parents opinions

regarding the pupil absence answering questions such as do the principals view pupil absence as a problem at their school, do parents accept their children skipping school, do parents think it is a good idea to go on vacations outside of school holidays, and what methods do both principals and parents prefer to minimize pupil absence.

This turned into a number of interesting articles with numerous cases which provided perspective to the data on national pupil absence.

Even more data… Surveys among parents and school-leaders

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The people behind the dataWe wrote articles about the schools with most absence and the ones with least. We talked to parents who were concerned. We interviewed young students who explained why they do not go to school every day. And parents who explained how they felt a need to sometimes give the children a break from school.

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We published a detailed description of our methods, journalism and data. We tried to be very explicit about our choic-es and struggle to get the data. We believe our readers need to be well informed

to secure the credibility of all data and stories.

How did we work with data?

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Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) is a media with television production, radio and webpage. We also have a special channel for children called DR Ultra. They broadcast news for children

as well. Our theme was – of course– of interest for their viewers and readers too, so they made versions of our stories for the children at the same time as we published our stories. Ultra News also

made at guide for the children so they could use our graphic to see their own school absence. It was a great hit.

A story for the children

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Dr.dk is located in a mediaorganization that started as a radio station, going on to expand as the first broadcast station in Denmark. To consider web a central platform for investigative stories is new

to DR. But the Investigative Data Team has been successful in cooperating with editors at radio and at television to make sure, that our stories get displayed on all platforms.

Web-first – now it works!

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But not only editors and journalists within DR thought that the stories about Danish student’s absence from school were great news. Also newspapers – na-tional as well as local – found the data so interesting and important that some of them copied our graphic and printed it.

The impact of our story is significant in the sense that before we published, nobody knew how much the students stayed out of school in a year. Now everybody can see for their own class or school exactly how many days a year the students were absent last semester. And

even more important: they can com-pare. So teachers, principals, parents, students and politicians are now aware of a problem they didn’t know the ex-tent of before. And they are now able to make informed decisions on how to act.

Now people can act

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To collectdata we sent a FOI request to the Danish Agency for learning and sta-tistics, UNI-C, under the Danish Ministry of Education in October 2013.

However UNI-C was not willing to pro-vide us with the absentee data for Dan-ish school students since they believed we were not entitled to the data under the Danish Freedom of Information Act. We then complained about this decision to the Ministry of Education.

The ministry used nearly two months to process our complaint but in the end also decided not to give us data for the

same reasons UNI-C provided us. Even though Danish Law allows for ministries and government agencies to give addi-tional access to data which is not directly covered by the Freedom of Information Act, the Ministry of Education decided not to use this rule.However the Danish Information of Free-dom Act was changed the 1st of January 2014. The new law put more emphasis on the rule of additional access and also specifically provided access to govern-ment databases.

We therefore renewed our request to UNI-C. The agency again denied access

to the data this time with the reason that it would take them too long to process the data. Also they did not want to give us the data based on the rules of additional access but instead offered to provide us with data for all the different schools but not for the different grades.

We then complained for the second time to the Ministry of Education which this time finally accepted our request. They chose to give us the data based on the rules of additional access. Their reason was that the new law’s emphasis on this rule was decisive.

More details about how we acquired data