Recently, in my ICT (computer science) lessons, we have been learning about the census.

If you didn’t already know, the census only happens every 10 years (starting right back in 1801) so the last time it happened in 2011 - I was only four!

The census is a form the government sends round for all households to fill in. It focuses on your views about your location, which then helps the government decide where to spend money to help improve your area. It can help identify facilities and infrastructure needed which can include transport, education and healthcare.

At school we were set a competition to encourage more people to complete the census. We were put into groups to plan how we would successfully run our own census, which included having to decide who our targeted audience would be, where we would advertise, the theme and message behind it.

After working together in our group, we decided our targeted audience would be ‘people living in England who speak a different language’.

This would help people that are part of our society understand and engage in the census, this would be achieved by having extra signs in their language or having a translate button on all apps on their phone and providing extra resources.

We had a choice of themes to focus on and we chose ‘jobs and businesses’ and came up with the message ‘shaping the community with jobs for all’.

We aren’t quite sure yet but we were thinking of advertising on social media, this is still a fluid plan and we are not quite there yet, but the amount of planning alone has been time consuming and complicated.

This whole project has put into perspective the huge task that the Office of National Statistics (ONS) is faced with to encourage every household to complete the questions and the importance that it has for each community in shaping their future.

Look out for your census soon, you may have heard adverts on the radio or seen social media posts alerting you to it. It will also be coming through the post any day now!