Fahrenheit's Blog

Read that damning UNICEF report? Worried we're failing our kids?

Don't believe a word of it.

Croydonian did a sterling job of exposing their dodgy statistics, and now I've got a bit more.

I ran some z-scores this afternoon. That's a statistical test that looks at how different our scores were from the average and shows whether the differences are statistically significant, or close enough to the average to just be a chance variation.

I found that out of the 40 measures in that study only 3 showed the UK being significantly different from the other countries. The other 37 could just be chance statistical fluctuations - certainly not a solid basis for making policy.


And the 3 measure where we DID score significantly higher than everybody else?

1. Percentage of young people who have been drunk two or more times, aged 11, 13, 15 (2001)

2. Percentage of young people who have had sexual intercourse, aged 15 (2001)

and as a perhaps unsurprising consequence...

3. Percentage of young people rating their health as ‘fair or poor’, aged 11, 13 and 15 (2001)



Our kids, eh? Gotta love 'em.