#MakeoverMonday W37 | School Workforce in England

For this week’s #MakeoverMonday, our task was to makeover a visualisation based around the mean pay of classroom, leadership and head teachers in England by gender. Here is the original visualisation:

What I liked:

  • I like how it is a straightforward bar chart.
  • It is sorted by ascending order which places emphasis on the lowest mean pay bars.
  • It focuses on the most recent time period (2019/20).

What could be improved:

  • There are too many colours which makes it difficult to understand quickly what the graph is showing.
  • The legend is very longwinded and detailed and this could be simplified to make it easier to digest.
  • The gridlines could be removed.
  • The values could be placed next to the bars as labels instead of on an axis.
  • It would be interesting to see changes over time, as this does just focus on one time period.

What I changed:

  • I wanted to include all the years within the dataset and to show changes over time, so I used an area chart and divided it between both female and male to make it easy to compare across all teaching roles.
  • I added a show/hide container button which allows you to view the percentage difference of mean pay in 2019 compared to 2010, as I thought it would be interesting to see how this may have changed in the past decade or so.
  • The new colour scheme is very minimal, with both female and male having different colours only. I think this helped to make things easier to understand, as I highlighted both genders in those colours within the text which meant there was no need for a legend.
  • I removed all gridlines and axis rulers to make it appear cleaner and less cluttered.

Link to interactive viz

Author:
Priya Padham
Powered by The Information Lab
1st Floor, 25 Watling Street, London, EC4M 9BR
Subscribe
to our Newsletter
Get the lastest news about The Data School and application tips
Subscribe now
© 2025 The Information Lab