Atlas of Childhood (at risk) – 2017 Edition

An Atlas entirely dedicated to the educational challenge, full of maps, images, and keywords. An exciting journey through the Italy that plans its future.

The Atlas shows, with an abundance of data, how little has been done over the decades to put school in a position to function well, in the conviction that only such a rich overview can help to better understand which roads to continue to follow and which to renew, which improvements are necessary and how many changes still need to be made in order to have a better school, and therefore a better future.

Alongside so much excellence, in Italian schools there are unacceptable situations of didactic illiteracy, organizational precariousness, structural deficiencies, relational deserts, real discrimination and injustice that make the most disadvantaged children pay an enormous price, as shown by the data on the serious emergency that Save the Children has defined as educational poverty.

The 2017 edition of the Atlas was created with the intention of using documents, data and tools for better understanding the situation of schools in Italy. The goal is to propose an alternative journey in the educational territories with the intention of observing the school, particularly from the perspective of those who live on the margins.

The Atlas provides numerous maps that allow a simultaneous, summary and comparative view of the phenomena, helping us to read the needs and to orient choices and intervention programs. The translation of the indicators into maps and graphs was done through the GIS system and the data were entered into a database.

Below are some maps taken from the Atlas.

The map captures the outcome of the questionnaire submitted to 540,000 15-year-old students in 72 countries by the 2015 PISA survey to probe some emotional, psychological, and relational aspects of their school experience.

The map shows for each province the incidence of students with non-Italian citizenship on the total number of students.

The map shows strong regional inequalities, from the regions of the Northeast where just over 1 child in 10 experiences a condition of relative poverty to regions such as Calabria and Sicily where almost 1 child in 2 is poor.

European comparison shows Italy’s low investment in schooling. In 2015, Italy devoted only 4% of gross domestic product to education.

The map shows that in our country the socio-economic factor conditions the rate of repetition much more than in the average of OECD countries.

gisAction has designed the StoryMap to disseminate on the web an extract of the contents, texts, maps and images of the Atlas.

The StoryMap allows to integrate to the texts all the multimedia contents that help to describe phenomena and reality: images, videos and maps. The maps can be interrogated and navigated to learn about the details of the data. The videos that intersperse the texts provide concrete evidence of the work of the Organization and the realities in which it works.

• Communicative Maps;
• Updatable contents;
• Comprehensive overview on school;
• Multimedial contents integration with StoryMap.

We have created a web portal to share and make usable the processed data in the form of Open Data. All data from the Atlas of Children at Risk are published on the ArcGIS Hub Open Data where, each year, Save the Children makes available to practitioners and the general public the data, elaborations and maps produced in reference to the Atlas theme. Through the ArcGIS Hub portal, geographic datasets can be publicly viewed, downloaded in different formats for reuse, or integrated directly into one’s own maps via ArcGIS Online or via API if using other GIS systems.

The StoryMap “Letter to School“, which is the abstract for the 2017 Atlas of Childhood, won the 2018 ESRI International Award as one of the best historical maps for the “Science, Technology and Education” category.