Appendix: Regional council areas

Changes to 2010 regional council area data

Changes to indicators

Participation in early childhood education. The measure has been changed to prior participation in ECE by new school entrants (Year 1 students). This measure does not involve double counting and it aligns with the regional data by ethnic group available on the Ministry of Education’s Education Counts website.

Workplace injury claims. The social report indicator has been renamed work-related injury claims for consistency with the data source.

Language retention. This indicator has been dropped from the regional report because of inconsistency with the main social report, where outcomes are reported separately for selected ethnic groups with an established resident population in New Zealand, not for the sum of all people in such ethnic groups.

Drinking-water quality. This indicator has been deleted from the social report because of data limitations. Different levels of monitoring for different sizes of water supply make it difficult to interpret the data. This indicator is available in environmental monitoring reports published by other agencies. For the most recent Annual Review of Drinking-Water Quality in New Zealand, see the Ministry of Health’s website.

Recorded crime. Rates are presented for police districts for consistency with the data source.

Road casualties. As the number of deaths in some regional council areas is small, death and injury data is combined into a single road casualty rate.

Changes in presentation

A number of changes have been made to streamline the production of the regional social report without the loss of indicator information.

Each indicator has one map (in previous years, some had two). For life expectancy and contact between young people and their parents, there is a single map but the data by sex remains available in the tables below the maps.

Regional tables now include indicator results for New Zealand for comparison.

Changes on the website

Regional information on the social report website is presented by indicator for all regions, but it is not repackaged for each individual region as in previous years.

The Social Report 2010 included a number of additional tables of census-based regional information which are still current but which have not been repeated in this year’s report. These tables can still be accessed from the website as the regional information for The Social Report 2009 will remain online.