Finding how many students live in a certain town or postcode

Find out how many students live in a particular area, such as a town, county or postcode area, by building a report in the Custom Report Writer. 
 

Permissions

• Student Profile: Contact Details: View All/My Students - Lets you report on student address details, like postcodes.
• School: General Admin: Export Data or School: Custom Report Writer: Superuser lets you create custom reports.

If you don’t have these permissions, ask your admin team to grant them using these instructions. 
 

Creating the basic Custom Report 

• Head to School > Custom Report Writer
• Click Create New Report 
• Click Create New Report on the slide-over too
• Set the Report focus to Students
• Give your report a Title, tick Skip setup wizard? and click Next
  
  
   
• This takes you through to the report's editing screen. You can adjust things like:
   
  • The Date Range - this defaults to Current Academic year to show students who have an enrolment at any point in the current year. You can change this to Today, for example, to only show current students; set this to Previous academic year to show students with an enrolment last year; or set this to Custom and choose a specific day or date range to include.
  • The Report Columns  - Add any additional report columns you want to include, like the student Postal Codes or Towns. Just click +Add another, select the right column(s) in the dropdown and click Add column.
    
    
     
  • You can click Save & View Report to preview your columns and data

You can use the Table filters to temporarily narrow down the results based on the columns you added, or you can use one of the methods in the next section to manipulate the report further. See how to use Table Filters here: Tables across the MIS

Getting the report to flag, filter or group students by area

Depending on the information you need, there are different ways to manipulate the report to show and/or count your students in a specific area. Some of the options you can consider are outlined below.
 

Filter the report by Town

You can use this option to remove students who do not live in a specific town from your report. Because the Town field is required for each address (County, for example, isn't), this option lets you filter each student (as long as they have an address).

This method is quick, but not as precise as some other options. Furthermore, you can only filter by one town at a time; if you need to report on all students in two specific towns, you would need two reports.

• In the Filters section, select Postal Address (Town) and click Add Filter
• Set the Filter Condition to Equals (=)
• Enter the name of the town
• Click Save
• Click Save & View report to review the list of students. The Row Count (if you added a Summary Formula) and number of Results show how many students live in the town.
  
  

For example, if you want to see all students who live in London, you might add a Postal Address (Town) filter and set the Filter Condition to Equals (=) London.

Group the report by Town 

This option allows you to consider multiple towns/areas at once, but does require you to manually add up the number of students in each town. As with filtering by Town, if you use multiple spellings for the same town or city (E.g. London and LDN), you will need to bear in mind that each spelling will correspond to a different row in the report. 

• In the Groupings section, click +Add another
• Select Postal Address (Town) in the drop-down and click Add Grouping

• Click Save on the slide-over

When you now go to view the report, each row will be a town with a Group Size column showing how many students live in each town.

Filter the report by a (partial) Postcode

Postcode is another required Address field in Arbor (i.e. if you record an address, you need to include a postcode), so this is another option you can consider. This option is also quick to set up, and because postcodes are standardised, you do not have to contend with spelling.

The disadvantages of filtering by postcode are:

• You can only reliably use a Contains filter for one postcode/partial postcode at a time
• If you filter by a partial postcode (e.g. postcodes containing the letters NW) postcodes that end in that partial (e.g SR1 3NW) will also be returned.
• If you filter by a partial postcode with one digit after the letters (e.g. NW1), your filtering may return additional postcodes unless you make sure to add a space after the initial part (e.g 'NW1' can return NW11 and NW12 postcodes too; 'NW1 ' will only return NW1 postcodes )

• In the Filters section, select Postal Address (Postal Code) and click Add Filter
• Set the Filter Condition to Contains
• Enter the exact or partial postcode you want to filter by (e.g. 'NW' or 'LS11 ')
  
  
   
• Click Save

• Click Save & View report to review the list of students. The Row Count (if you added a Summary Formula) and number of Results show how many students were returned.

  

Want the report to show you how many students are left after filtering? Add Row Count as the Summary Row Formula when you add a column.

Use a Formula Column to highlight and count specific postcodes and/or towns

A more precise option is to set up a formula to count students with postcodes that meet specific conditions. This option is more time-consuming and technical, but it lets you sort your data by a range of factors. 

For a more detailed discussion of how to add formulas, check out: Using advanced calculated formula fields in the Custom Report Writer

Disadvantages of this method:

• Easy to get wrong (formulas can break)
• Requires some technical know-how
• This option does not filter the report; students who do not meet the conditions you set are still returned
• You must have already added the Postal Code column to your report

• In the Report Columns section, find Advanced Calculation/Formula Column in the dropdown and click Add column
• On the slide-over, add a formula in the following format depending on the number of factors you want to consider:
   
  • One Factor (e.g. one partial postcode): =IF(SEARCH("[partial postcode]", "[Postal Code Column]")=1, 1,0))
  • Two Factors (e.g. two partial postcodes): =IF(SEARCH("[partial postcode 1]", "[Postal Code Column]")=1, 1, IF(SEARCH("[partial postcode2]", "[Postal Code Column]")=1, 1,0))

  • Three or more Factors: add another IF(SEARCH("...", "[Postal Code Column]")=1, 1, before the final 0. Then add one extra ) at the end. 

    For example =IF(SEARCH("NW1 ", "[Postal Code Column]")=1, 1, IF(SEARCH("NW2 ", "[Postal Code Column]")=1, 1, IF(SEARCH("NW3 ", "[Postal Code Column]")=1, 1, 0)))

• Set the Data type to Integer
• Set the Summary Row Formula to Sum (if you do not see this option, click Save and re-edit the column to make it appear)
• Click Save

You now have a column that shows a '1' if a postcode matches the conditions you set and a '0' if the condition is not met. The Sum field at the bottom of the column shows how many students meet the condition(s).

You can import this example report template to see two examples of how a formula like this works. For help importing report templates, check out: Importing a Custom Report Writer template or exporting a template to send to another school

You can also use the Column Filter and Column Ordering (see Tables across the MIS) when viewing the report to bring up the students included in the count.

You can also use this method to highlight students from a range of Towns, or you can use this to show students who live in a combination of specific towns and postcodes. For example, this formula helps you count students who either live in Leeds (Town), WF3 (Postcode) or WF10 (Postcode):

• =IF(SEARCH("WF3 ", "[Postal Code Column]")=1, 1, IF(SEARCH("WF10 ", "[Postal Code Column]")=1, 1, IF(SEARCH("Leeds", "[Town Column]")=1, 1, 0)))

 

Note: Make sure to add a Town column to your report so you can select it in the formula!

The visual option

Arbor has a Student Map feature (Students > All Students > Map) that shows where enrolled students live, but it cannot give you an automatic count of students in a specific area - you would need to count them instead. See Map of where our students live.