Number of children or students engaged performance commitment data

What are performance commitments (PCs)?

The water regulator Ofwat sets targets called performance commitments (PCs) to ensure companies deliver the best possible service for customers, society and the environment. Wessex Water has a range of PCs for the 2020-25 period.

Each year we report our results against these commitments, in our Annual Performance Report.

Where appropriate we’re publishing the data underpinning calculation of the PCs – you can find our other PC datasets in the Performance Commitments section.

Number of children or students engaged PC

Our customers have an appetite to learn about the work we do and the positive impact their behaviour can have on the environment and our services. Through our free education service, we teach children and students about water treatment, water recycling and much more.

The children & students engaged PC reports the number of children / students each year who we engage with in person* through:

• visits to our education centres and operational sites;
• visits our education team make to schools, colleges and community groups; or
• community projects we organise that involve children / students.
  

Children or students must be 18 years old or less and in education to count towards the PC, and the session must involve a hands-on activity of at least 20 minutes.

Engaging with young people can help them understand the importance of using water wisely and only flushing the correct items down the loo. This PC incentivises us to increase the coverage of our education programmes, furthering the benefits of these changes to behaviours.

* Restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic limited the in-person engagement activities we could undertake. Therefore for reporting years 2020-21 and 2021-22 Ofwat made a concession to allow virtual lessons to contribute towards the PC.

Dataset details

This dataset shows the total number of children and students each month that contribute to our performance commitment by participating in engagement sessions. The figures are presented by the type of engagement e.g. school visit, site visit.

This excludes children or students attending sessions that last less than 20 minutes or with over 30 participants. Children or students that we have engaged with in previous years are also excluded.

* Restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic limited the in-person engagement activities we could undertake. Therefore for reporting years 2020-21 and 2021-22 Ofwat made a concession to allow virtual lessons to contribute towards the PC.

** Engagement with children or students when they are present at a session run with adults, e.g. a community group.

How was this data collated?

Our education team maintains a log of education engagement visits. For each visit, the log is updated with the number of children / students engaged that are eligible to be counted towards the PC. The log also records the type of engagement e.g. school visit, site visit. The visit organisers complete an external survey to confirm numbers – we use this to cross-check the information in the log. The published data was produced from an extract of this log. Engagement visits were grouped together by type to give monthly totals for each.

Data quality

The data for the 2020-21 reporting year is not broken down into months or engagement types. 2020-21 was the first year of the 2020-25 reporting period and our data capture was not fully mature at that stage.

Publish frequency

For the remaining years of the 2020-25 period, an additional year of data will be added after the annual reporting period.

If you have any questions or comments about this data set, please get in touch via opendata@wessexwater.co.uk

Terms of use

This dataset is licensed under CC BY, an open data licence, to make it freely available to other potential customers, stakeholders or interested organisations.