In academic and practice communities, and in everyday language, there is variation in what gets called ‘data’. In this project, we will avoid placing narrow parameters on what we see as ‘data’, recognising that people will use the term in different ways, and that children, young people and families may not use it at all. Instead, we are working with local authorities to encourage better use of better data of all kinds. This includes discussion about the kinds of information that are collected, collated, processed and used for the purposes of informing practice and how different sorts of information are best used in different ways and together.
We are asking:
- What do you think about as ‘data’?
- Is this restricted to administrative datasets – for example, on care leavers’ education, employment and training status, numbers and sources of referrals to Early Help and Children’s Social Care, or scores on child development assessments completed by parents?
- Do you treat other forms of information– such as children’s case notes, satisfaction surveys, or feedback from consultation events – as useful information for research and analysis? How to you use this information?
With each site, we are exploring the potential to make better use of the wide variety of information that local authorities do and can have access to, in order to inform practice.
A key element of this – and one of our ‘core practices’ - is to support local authorities to enable the voices of children, young people, parents/carers and practitioners to be better listened to and to inform practice with individuals, families and communities. We use the term ‘voice’ inclusively here, to refer to their views, wishes, feelings, priorities and lived experiences. Our aim is to ensure that all these are communicated and heard both within the children’s information that local authorities use, and about how that information is gathered, collated, shared, processed and used. Achieving this means recognising, for example, that voices can be non-verbal as well as verbal, implicit or explicit, easy or hard to reach, fluid or fixed, and they are produced in contexts and through relationships. This project brings us the opportunity to work with local authorities in developing and testing methods of amplifying these diverse voices both within and about children’s information, in ways that are rights-respecting, meaningful and can improve lives.
Click here to review presentation slides from the research team discussing the definitions of data and voice
