NEWS - ADR Scotland launch new linkable datasets

ADR Scotland

ADR Scotland (Administrative Data Research Scotland) is a partnership combining specialists in the Scottish Government with the expertise of academic researchers at the Scottish Centre for Administrative Data Research (SCADR). One of our aims is for ADR Scotland to transform how public sector data is curated, accessed and utilised for research that brings public benefit and contributes to insights into policy priorities in Scotland.

Since April 2023, one of our delivery bodies, Research Data Scotland (RDS) have been working with the Scottish Government to support the practical data ingest work of the ADR Scotland programme, making datasets on children and young people available for research that is for the public's benefit.  

Education datasets

We are delighted that new datasets focusing on children and young people's education are now available through the ADR Scotland programme, for accredited researchers to access within Scotland’s National Safe Haven, with more on the way over the next few months.  

In September, we announced that researchers could request access to the Achievement of Curriculum for Excellence Levels (ACEL) dataset, as well as updated versions of the Pupil Census, Attendance and Absences, and Exclusions datasets. These datasets are linkable to each other, and to other datasets within Scotland’s National Safe Haven, such as health and geographical data. 

For more information on these datasets please visit the ADR Scotland Data Catalogue.

More datasets coming soon in 2024/25 

Several other education datasets will be made available by ADR Scotland for data linkage research before the end of 2024/25. These will include:

• the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Growing Up in Scotland (GUS), and Provider Qualifications.    
• updates to existing datasets will also include School Leaver Destinations and Attainment, and SQA Qualifications.  

Early next year, Scottish Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) data will be made available to researchers for the first time, which will be available through an application to the Office of National Statistics (ONS). This will be a partial release of Scottish LEO data, focused on the university dataset, with education outcomes available for tax years 2005/06 to 2021/22 on release, with more years of data to be included in future iterations as they become available. 

For the full story, please visit the original article by Research Data Scotland - here.