Future events
Details of future events will be published here. Please scroll down for details of past events.
HOLD THE DATE: 17th Nov 2026 11.30am-12.30pm
Children’s Social Care Reforms: what do data users need to know
We will be meeting on MS Teams, if you would like to join us, please fill in the form to join our group.
Past events
PAST EVENTS
8: 25 November 2025 – ‘Imagining a Centre of Excellence for data and digital work in children’s social care’.
The webinar presentation was led by our long-term collaborators Data to Insight (D2I). The Department for Education is working with the ‘D2I consortium’ (Data to Insight, Coram, the Local Government Association, ICT Revolutions, and Social Finance) to design a ‘Centre of Excellence’ – a support offer for data and digital work in Children’s Social Care. The project is taking a sector-led approach, learning from what works and proposing to change what doesn’t. This webinar gave the project team space to share what they think they know, and seek your input to challenge and improve the design work, helping ensure that the Centre of Excellence is designed in ways which will improve your work and help the wider system deliver better outcomes for vulnerable children.
7: 25 February 2025 – ‘Children’s Social Care Dashboard Demo/Q&A’
The Children’s social care dashboard is designed to support local authorities and partners with the implementation of the children’s social care national framework, see here. In this CSCDUG event, colleagues from Department of Education provided a demonstration of the CSC dashboard followed by discussion with the CSCDUG attendees to inform future developments.
Click the link for the recording: https://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Player/3BaG3GIi
6: October 2024
Our October 2024 online event focused on using local children’s social care data for analyses and evaluation, with three illustrative examples presented. Please click below to access slides.
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/evaluation-of-new-roads-impact-on-the-police-service/272820566
5: 7 March 2024 -Using CSC administrative data to evaluate services and interventions
Click here to watch the recording through OneDrive (for contents of recording, scroll down)
Our event held in March 2024 focused on how we can use children’s social care administrative data to evaluate services and interventions, and the advantages and limitations of doing so. Key challenges include: difficulties in selecting meaningful outcome measures that are sensitive to change from the intervention and simple to interpret and residual confounding due to limited matching variables in the administrative data. Challenges in outcomes and appropriately matched control groups will result in under-estimates of effects. We discussed the phenomena of ‘no evidence of effect’ studies using administrative data and (often) quasi-experimental designs. We also discussed how those completing research – and policymakers interpreting research – should carefully consider appropriate outcomes and which ‘outcomes’ may in fact be a measure of demand and/or service thresholds. Using service provision as an outcome (e.g. rates of child protection plans or hospital admissions) can be difficult to interpret as these are measures of demand and are also related to thresholds for services. It is difficult to know if lower rates of child protection plans indicate positive change (problems prevented from escalating) or undesirable change (reduced capacity and higher thresholds and/or decreased ‘demand’ despite ongoing need). We discussed the need for meaningful and proximal outcomes (such as changes in behaviour, skills or attitude) that may not be available in administrative data but which could be collected in prospective studies and linked to administrative data. The group expressed appetite for coming together to try and influence thinking about evaluations using children’s social care administrative data, with a suggestion of a collective position statement. This is an endeavour that we are intending to pursue and will keep our membership updated on our plans.
Contents of recording:
Click here to watch the recording through OneDrive
1-4:40 –Dr Jenny Woodman (UCL)
Introduction- using administrative data to evaluate interventions and services relevant to children’s social care
4:40 – 20:00 – Dr Joanna Soraghan (University of Strathclyde)
The relationship between structural integration of health and social care services and children’s outcomes in Scotland
20:00 – 35:20 – Prof Katie Harron (UCL)
Intensive home visiting for adolescent mothers in the Family Nurse Partnership in England 2010-2019: findings and challenges of a population based-data linkage cohort study using propensity score matching
35:20 – 48:50 – Catherine Bunting (UCL)
Methods for using administrative data to evaluate interventions in the early years: An example using targeted trial emulation to evaluate whether health visiting improves family health outcomes
4: 3 July 2023
Presenting the Sector-led Standard Safeguarding Dataset
Click here to access slides – 1
Click here to access slides – 2
Click here to watch the recording through Zoom- 3 Passcode for recording: c&$tX41d
Click here to watch the recording through OneDrive
Colleagues from Data to Insight, the LA-led service for children’s safeguarding data professionals, are delivering a DfE-funded project in partnership with LAs to define a new “standard safeguarding dataset” which all LAs will be able to produce from their safeguarding information systems.
At this session, they shared what they’ve learned so far from user research with LA colleagues and discussed their early thinking about what a better standard dataset might look like. Participants shared their own thoughts about how to improve these systems and processes.
Presenters
Alistair Herbert
Alistair is the lead officer for Data to Insight, the LA-led service for children’s safeguarding data professionals. With a career focused on local authority children’s services data work, he knows about safeguarding data, information systems, and cross-organisation collaboration.
John Foster
John is a Data Manager for Data to Insight. He has supported a range of children’s services data work, most recently at Shropshire Council. He led Data to Insight’s project to introduce the first national benchmarking dataset for Early Help, and is the user research lead for Data to Insight’s Standard Safeguarding Dataset project.
Rob Harrison and Joe Cornford-Hutchings
Rob and Joe are new Data Managers joining Data to Insight from the private and public sector respectively. They bring between them a wealth of experience and technical expertise, and will be working together to support design and implementation of the new Standard Safeguarding Dataset through 2023-24.
3: 26th April 2022
Our third virtual event was held on 26th April 2022. We had two presentations and lots of discussion.
PRESENTATIONS
Collaborative Demand Modelling with Data to Insight – Outputs to date and future possibilities. Speaker: Alistair Herbert, East Sussex County Council. Click here to access slides
Understanding kinship care and residential care in England – descriptive analysis using SSDA903 data. Speaker: Eva Schoenwald, What Works for Children’s Social Care.
2: 26th April 2021
Our second CSCDUG virtual event took place on 26th April 2021, on the topic of measuring need, vulnerability and deprivation in CSC data and CSC research. Links to presentations and to notes from the event can be found below.
PRESENTATIONS
Conceptual differences between need and activity and data considerations. Speaker: Peter Fitzsimons, Department for Education. Click here to access slides
Building a data wafer and what you can use it for: integrating the CSC data with area-based measures of need. Speaker: Calum Webb, University of Sheffield. Click here to access slides
Contextual safeguarding: using child-level data to inform adolescent safeguarding. Speaker Rashid Jussa, Waltham Forest Council and Chair of Children’s Services National Performance and Information Management Group (CS-NPIG). Click here to access slides
The Children’s Vulnerability Framework. Speaker: Leon Feinstein, University of Oxford. Click here to access slides
NOTES FROM THE DAY
Click here for notes from the day, which can be added to by our CSCDUG community
1: 20th October 2020
Our first online meeting was held on 20th October 2020. The main topics discussed at the meeting were:
-The importance of including learning about and from Welsh data in discussions. We would ask data users to please add UK nation studies to the Google document on the website, on the Research and Analysis page
-Evidence for raised rates of domestic violence and poor parental mental health, poverty and economic insecurity during COVID-19.
-The possibility of ONS synthetic CIN/CLA data produced by the ONS to be used outside the SRS: this would be extremely useful but would take time to get there
–LEO (which is UK) and how it is linked with CSC data which is separate for the UK nations (LEO will be linked separately for Welsh CSC data in SAIL rather than ONS)
-The impact of COVID-19 on data quality/completeness. Data quality will be affected and it will be even more important to share knowledge with LAs about the meaning of data items/findings. Local lockdowns will also have an impact on DfE data for that areas. There have been new variables added to local data to capture information relevant to services during the pandemic.
Please continue the discussion on the Q&A Forum.
Presenters’ slides are available by clicking on the links below: