Thursday January 31, 2019

The only national survey to comprehensively chart children’s views of their own lives is taking place across New Zealand from March 4. This year, media will be able to report the voice of Kiwi kids on issues as wide-ranging as climate change, the amount of time they spend on digital devices, how they handle interpersonal issues, and their own attitudes and perceived parental attitudes to activities such as drinking and smoking by young people.

CensusAtSchool New Zealand, known in te reo Māori as TataurangaKiTeKura Aotearoa, is a non-profit, online educational project that aims to bring statistics to life in both English and Māori-medium classrooms. Supervised by teachers, students from years 5-13 anonymously answer 30 questions in English or te reo Māori, and later explore the results in class. CensusAtSchool runs every two years, and in 2017, more than 32,000 students took part, representing 534 schools and 1,062 teachers.

Media can preview the questions in English and te reo Māori on the CensusAtSchoolwebsite here. We encourage you to browse the website for information and to see what sorts of stories emerged from CensusAtSchool in previous years. To find out which of your local schools took part in 2017, click here.

While the complete database is not available to media, information is available to data journalists through CensusAtSchool data tools, which comprise full summaries and random samples. CensusAtSchool can generate summary statistics for journalists who are keen to explore a topic.

CensusAtSchool, now in its ninth edition, is a collaborative project involving teachers, the University of Auckland’s Department of Statistics, Statistics New Zealand and the Ministry of Education.

It is part of an international effort to boost statistical capability among young people, and is carried out in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, the US, Japan and South Africa. Thecountries share some questions so comparisons can be made.

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