Designation is our blue flag

The Blue Flag award for beaches is internationally recognised. It highlights the beaches that have been found to meet and maintain the Foundation for Environmental Education’s environmental, educational, safety, and accessibility criteria. Our designation for official statistics is the equivalent of the Blue Flag for beaches – it clearly marks the statistics that meet our standards of Trustworthiness, Quality and Value.

But at the beach you don’t want to just know that the beach is well kept and has good services and information, you want to know that it is safe on the day that you visit. You will see yellow lifeguard flags posted to warn beach users of the current dangers (excuse the pun) – it alerts you to what you need to know now. And in statistics we see the equivalent need for producers to give clear, current quality information that alerts users to the specific limitations and issues that they should consider when deciding on how to use the data and statistics. We have a strand of our project that is looking further into communicating quality and we hope to report more about that soon.