What do Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and the Wikipedia entry explaining mathematical integrals have in common?
They’re both easier to understand than Kirklees Council’s budget report.
According to an analysis by the Trinity Mirror Data Unit you would need to have been in education for 14.4 years in order to understand the council’s budget.
This makes it the equivalent of a university level text when it is supposed to be accessible to the general public.
In comparison, Stephen Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time would require the reader to have undergone a modest 11.6 years of education before it could be understood.
The study analysed extracts from 40 different council budget reports as well as excerpts from classic works of literature, philosophy and science.
Each extract was given a score based upon a combination of different algorithms that are used to calculate the difficulty of a text.
The measures used were the Flesch-Kincaid algorithm, the SMOG Index, the Gunning-Fog measure and the Coleman-Liau Index.
Each measure ends up with the same kind of grade based upon the number of years of education a person would need to be able to read and understand a specific text. They incorporate things like average sentence length and average syllables per word.
Wherever possible the study included the introductory passages from each council’s most recent budget report - the document designed to tell the public what the council intends to spend their taxes on.
The average score of all 40 council reports was 12.6 years of education - the equivalent of a post-GCSE level text.
This means that council reports are more difficult to understand than Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (11.6 years), Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (10.8) and the Wikipedia entry explaining the use of integrals in mathematics (12.2).
Redcar and Cleveland Council had the most complicated budget out of all of the council’s analysed. It would take somebody 22.5 years of education in order to understand it making it more complicated than a university level text.
The most complicated text in the entire study according to the algorithms was the first sentence from the last chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
The sentence, which is 1,873 words long and details the thoughts of a character called Molly Bloom, would theoretically require somebody to have 495 years of education under their belt before they could understand it.
Kirklees Council’s Director of Resources David Smith said: “While the document in question is complex, the budget process is complex and this is by no means the only information we make available to members of the public and to local businesses to make it as easy as possible for them to be involved in the consultation. We took a fresh approach this year, given the scale of the budget challenge facing the council, which meant putting everything we hold into the public domain, to allow for as broad a debate as possible.
“So as well as the report here, we also published the cabinet report, a consultation summary which led to the first phase of questions, we have made information available online, and all this builds on the major change we began last year through the It’s Time To Talk engagement where we used video, face to face events and social media platforms.
“Initial feedback suggests more people than ever before took part in phase one of the consultation this time, with a good level of understanding of the issues and responses to the proposals, and there were several thousand people who took part in It’s Time To Talk. We will continue to put out information in as many formats as possible so residents can take part in whichever way they feel comfortable. The video here on youtube shows the approach with young people http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fRLPBn0tqo
