SPA provides a small range of specialist services to public sector clients.
SPA has always enjoyed doing a wide variety of work – particularly socially useful projects of current policy interest. We have secured public sector work mainly where our core skills are most relevant:



Our Public Sector Work in a Nutshell

Social Profiling of Schools from Postcodes
The idea is simple: use children’s Postcodes to assess the social mix of their school – you can compare schools anywhere in Britain. Postcodes work better than Free School Meals. They also work better than crude catchments built from whole Census Output Areas, because results adjust automatically (e.g. year on year) for where the children live without applying the weightings that would be necessary using OAs.

Working with Professor Ivan Reid of Bradford University, SPA pioneered the use in Education of the MOSAIC geodemographic classification of Postcodes. We found that the MOSAIC Type in which a student lives is a good predictor of his/her school exam performance – a far better predictor than Free School Meals. We went on to use MOSAIC to summarise the overall social mix of each school roll. We found that students from a given MOSAIC Type at schools with a favourable social mix did significantly better in exams than students from the same MOSAIC Type at schools with a less favourable social mix. Early work, in the context of LMS, proved that MOSAIC analysis of school rolls provided a sound basis for resource allocation (Fair Funding), and for the understanding of "value added" in school performance. We went on to do projects over several successive years for LEAs including Bradford and Stoke-on-Trent.


Service-Point Catchment Area Analysis
All you need is the Postcodes of users of any service-point. We’ve worked on FE Colleges, but our techniques would apply just as well to recycling centres (tips), job centres, doctors’ surgeries, schools, libraries, museums, and even Post Offices. Given users’ Postcodes, you can:



Service Uptake Analysis
Here we need the Postcodes of service-users, a measure of their usage level, and ideally personal data (age, work status) too. We can then look at what kinds of people users are, and which groups use the service most. Often we want to compare results with the Census – e.g. area age mix. But it is getting old (2001), so we try to minimise our reliance on any base data, or use updated sources.

Of course number-crunching isn’t everything. If uptake of library services by certain groups is low, what should the policy response be? With low usage by some priority socially excluded groups and amongst certain very affluent types, this is not a simple matter. And then there’s the cost!


Marketing Plans
Time was when Colleges didn’t need marketing plans! Now they do, and we’re keen to help. But it’s not just Colleges. More and more public sector undertakings are beginning to look more carefully at how users access their services. The Credit Crunch is forcing us to focus even more on the issues of access, take-up and cost – turning private sector market analysis techniques to more socially useful ends. Work that makes you think again is work worth doing. At SPA, we’re up for it.


Route Planning
SATNAV will tell you how to get from A to B to C. SPA can optimise hundreds of calls to be made over periods as long as 4-12 weeks. To do it, we use Postcodes and route planning software. We’ve planned regular mobile libraries services, and ad hoc deliveries of books to primary schools. It is vital to get the practicalities right – when schools are open to accept deliveries, how early drivers can set off, how long they have for lunch, etc. Computers may be clever, but they don’t think for you. At SPA we know what questions to ask to make sure the computer will deliver the goods!

Most clients like finished journey plans delivered in Excel – making them easy to print out. Excel also makes it easy to make small changes – moving the odd stop, or switching two or three deliveries around should the need arise. We can also produce summary and detailed route maps if required.


Driving and Environmental Impact Analysis
At SPA, we’ve found other uses for our route-planning software. Given their postcodes, we can estimate the drivetimes and distances driven by the users of key public facilities like recycling centres, libraries, schools and colleges. Increasingly, local authorities need to consider the environmental impact of all such journeys when deciding how services are provided and where service-points should be located. For over 20+ years, SPA has analysed drivetimes in private sector work to establish what is acceptable to customers. At last we’re using the same techniques to figure out what is acceptable for the planet!


Public Sector Survey Analysis
Both public and private sector clients want unbiased answers to their survey question – preferably as numbers, that are clear and hard to dispute. But the two mind set aren’t quite the same. So the questions are different, and may need to be analysed differently. At SPA we enjoy working at the interface between public and private sector perspectives. With spending cuts destined to be our way of life for some time, a blend of public sector best practice with private sector focus is a way forward. We’ve done lots of survey work – usage, attitudes, customer satisfaction, and so on. If you need a survey based around any public service or facility, we’d be delighted to help you. See Your Survey.

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