Atlas of Childhood and StoryMap dedicated to school. Save the Children’s 2017 “Letter to School” edition analyzes the conditions of children and adolescents at risk of exclusion.
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.
Needs: using data to project the 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.
Solution: the Atlas
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.
Benefits
- Communicative Maps;
- Updatable contents;
- Comprehensive overview on school;
- Multimedial contents integration with StoryMap.
StoryMap
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.
Award
The StoryMap “Letter to the 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.
Open Data Atlas of Childhood at Risk – Save the Children Italy
2017 Edition Atlas of Childhood
Watch the interview to discover how the project was born
Who we worked with
Save the Children Italia is a non-profit organization established in 1998. It is part of the Save the Children International network, one of the largest independent International Organizations.
