Data collection, management and analysis is too easily treated as an afterthought, but should be central to how local authorities think about policymaking, evaluation and service delivery.
Building a national picture of whether interventions are working is almost impossible, because of a lack of consistent frameworks and measures, and the lack or poor quality of data on children’s needs and provision. A huge amount of even basic administrative data is hard to find in useable form. Even where it exists, it can miss those children in need who are not yet receiving the right support because of its focus on services being delivered.
We repeatedly heard practitioners complain that the inability to link data with other relevant services – like education and health – was preventing them building a full picture of need.
Poor data means that the benefits of children’s and young people’s services can be “hard to evidence” and arguably makes them an easier target for government cuts.
How to fix it
Given the scale of these problems, government needs to rethink how it approaches data in children’s and young people’s services. Data needs to be reimagined as a strategic asset.
Technological advances like machine learning and natural language processing have the potential to open up a new world of insights from qualitative data like case notes. Data sharing can be done safely and without competitive disadvantage through data trusts – legal structures that provide independent stewardship of data. Unique identifiers – individual numbers like those used in the NHS - could follow children and young people from service to service and allow individuals to be mapped across different datasets, linking data better.
Better data sharing and linking will bring strategic value to all levels of government, and to frontline service providers. Real-time, granular data will allow for much more innovation, and will help government identify what works, while also giving frontline workers a much clearer picture of need in their area.
Of course, we need strong safeguards, transparency and public engagement to make data linking work, but privacy-enhancing technologies like data minimisation, differential privacy, and genuine anonymisation mean that this is all possible.
Our report recommends that the Department for Education and Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government (MHCLG) should start by working with one local authority, to develop a model of data transformation that can be rolled out across the country. They should identify data supply and demand, laying out what data is currently available, who is responsible for it, who it is shared with, and what the needs are of different organisations. They should then conduct a gap analysis, identifying the data that is missing, redundant, or incomplete.
Armed with this information, DfE, MHCLG and their local authority partner should be well placed to address missing, incomplete or poor-quality data, by agreeing a set of common data input standards and security requirements, and funding IT improvements. They should work with relevant parties to sign comprehensive data-sharing arrangements, and ensure data is accessible through a bespoke data trust. Finally, they should take steps to address wider cultural barriers to change, through training and sharing best practice.
- Missing numbers in children’s services from www.nesta.org.uk
