June 2025
The Children’s Information Project has released a new report Seen, Heard and Understood: Unlocking the Potential of Children's Information Systems to Improve Outcomes, highlighting a framework for the government to assess and improve the quality of children’s information use.
Children's services collect large volumes of data, but often, the benefits and uses of it are unclear, and children's needs remain hidden. The ‘Framework for ethical and effective information use’ helps assess whether children’s information systems truly serve children and families, offering practical, evidence-led ways to improve them.
The Children’s Information Project, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, is led by the Rees Centre, which is a research centre of the Department of Education at the University of Oxford.
The project team brings together researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Sussex, the London School of Economics, and Research in Practice, collaborating with four local authority sites - Hampshire, North Yorkshire, Oldham, and Rochdale.
The project is developing a common framework to improve the uses of information in local authorities together with practical examples and practices for improving the use of children’s information. Through a Learning Network of 20 local authorities, the initiative explores barriers, enablers, and opportunities for innovation.
A Final Report will be published in October 2025, and will provide more detail on this framework, inviting a wider range of local and national agencies to improve information use.
Next steps for the Children’s Information Project
Building on the work in the four local authority sites to date, and with input from the Learning Network of 20 further local authorities, the next steps for the research team are as follows:
- Refine the prototype of the Framework for Effective Information Use as a practical tool that will serve to clarify the key practices needed to support well-functioning children’s information systems. This will help those responsible for such systems to understand the barriers and enablers to be addressed when improving the design of new or adapted information systems. In turn, this will ensure there is a transparent, ethical, proportionate and voice-informed link between the capture and use of data, and the outcomes a service or system is seeking to achieve.
- The prototype tool will incorporate a set of framing questions and criteria for local authorities to assess how well developed their information system is for each practice dimension. It will be launched with the sector at a Nuffield Foundation event in October 2025.
- The prototype tool will be used to evaluate the further progress each of the four local authority sites makes over the next year: in maturing their information system against the criteria; and in demonstrating how their redesigned information system impacts on improved decisions, services for children, and on children’s outcomes.
- The Final Report of this work will be available in Summer 2026. It will be accompanied by an updated version of the Framework and associated practical resources to help local leaders apply the learning and approaches to improve their own information systems.
- The practical resources developed over the next year will be shared and stress-tested through the Learning Network, facilitated by Research in Practice, to help extend the reach beyond the local authority sites.
- The project team will in parallel offer bespoke opportunities for working with the Department of Education on ways of applying the learning identified in this report to its children’s information initiatives.
