Pupils are being given expert tuition to help them cope with the “overwhelming” amount of information they can access on the internet.
Analysts from Deloitte have held tutorials at three Barnet schools to help children interpret publicly available data including statistics about crime, health, pollution and traffic.
Councillor Robert Rams of Barnet council said: “Councils sit on an enormous amount of data about our towns and cities, and the challenge has to be how we get that out to the public in a user-friendly way. Just shovelling out meaningless statistics isn’t real transparency.”
David Branch, public sector analytics director at Deloitte, said: “The Government is making lots of data that was previously inaccessible open to the public.
“But knowing how to tackle raw data in a meaningful way can be difficult.”
He said that if school children were shown how to analyse information properly they would be in a better position to hold local and national government to account.
He said: “School children are amazingly computer literate and have time on their hands to do some experimenting. We want children to be interested in the world around them so we can run the country better. People would be astonished by the amount of information that is out there about what is happening in your own postcode.”
