Performance of English local authorities

I spent a bit of time a week or so back downloading the latest data on English local authority performance for the last few years from the Audit Commission's web site. They already report on this data in a number of ways - but not like this. I think it adds value - makes it easy to quickly visualise performance (through their Comprehensive Performance Assessment or CPA process) of authorities across a region and England-wide. There's also a filter that allows you to subset the areas in different ways - by region, performance score, or type of authority. The one I like is the filter using the ONS classification of authorities - so you can compare all authorities which ONS regards, for example, as 'Prospering Smaller Towns' to benchmark their performance and how it's changing over time.

You can try this atlas - it's available at http://www.instantatlas.com/samples/la_cpa_results/atlas.html

Poor old Rutland and Liverpool stand-out as red 1 star hotspots in 2007 although Rutland is classed as 'Improving well'. Overall the pattern looks remarkably rosy with only 15 per cent of authorities with 1 or 2 stars. At this rate they'll have to come up with a new classification system, a bit like the announcement yesterday of a new A* category for A levels so they can differentiate between those who are really good A level exams (the A graders) from those who are truly great at them!

In fact the Audit Commission are actually doing away with their CPA process of assessment and replacing it with CAA - Comprehensive Area Assessments. So that could make it difficult to look at temporal trends for several years I guess.