NEWS - Additional funding for Understanding Children’s Lives and Outcomes

We are pleased to announce new funding for our research programme on Understanding Children’s Lives and Outcomes.

This funding enables us to build on our existing work and expand our research in this crucial area, to better understand children and young people’s pathways and outcomes and help to improve their health, wellbeing and attainment.

Led by Fiona Mitchell and Professor Morag Treanor, who both have extensive experience and links with policy and practitioner networks focused on children and young people, this research will focus on two core areas of research:

• Exploring context, factors and approaches to educational exclusions and absence
• Growing up in kinship care – increasing knowledge of the needs, circumstances and outcomes of children in formal kinship care

Co-lead of our Children’s programme, Professor Treanor, said:“Linking datasets provides new ways to analyse children’s outcomes and provide evidence-based insights for key policy debates. We aim not only to look at children in isolation but situate them within their household and familial context.”

This work is funded from October 2020 - March 2022 and will utilise datasets brought together for the first time by our ADR Scotland partners, Scottish Government.

Working closely with policy colleagues, our public panel and a new advisory group, this research programme aims to:

• inform policy and practice, in line with key developments including the implementation of The Promise following the Independent Care Review and initiatives such as the Scottish Attainment challenge
• maximise synergies and collaboration with UK research in this area
• promote the use and re-use of this data for the future

This is one of the research strands to receive a grant (£319,212) from the ADR UK Strategic Hub Fund.

ADR UK is an ESRC investment to transform the way researchers access the wealth of administrative data already created by public bodies across the UK.