Inequalities in child health and education outcomes: what we can (and can’t) learn from administrative data

Speaker: Professor Katie Harron

Recent advances in linking longitudinal, population-level data on health, education and social care services mean that we now have unprecedented statistical power to evaluate inequalities in childhood health and education outcomes. These data enable us to build a detailed picture of how children interact with different services as they grow up. However, methodological challenges remain, and administrative data do not always hold all the information we need to be able to make causal conclusions. In this talk, I will discuss some of the opportunities and challenges for using linked administrative data to understand inequalities in child outcomes, and for evaluating early interventions. I will draw on examples of research using ECHILD, a data resource linking cross-sector information for 21 million children in England.