Data On the Needs of Those Known and Unknown to Public Systems to Inform Service Design and Implementation

Introduction:

Data on the well-being of children and young people is central to many efforts to prioritise outcomes, risk and protective factors for improvement and to guide the selection and implementation of evidence-based programmes. However, whilst methodologies exist for collecting these data on broad populations of children (e.g. Communities that Care and Dartington’s Common Language approach), these operating systems have not explicitly considered the needs of those currently served by public agencies and services.

The Social Research Unit and Renfrewshire Council - near Glasgow in Scotland – sought to fill this gap. In 2010 Renfrewshire Council had the fourth largest proportion of children looked after per head of child population in Scotland. The Renfrewshire Children’s Services Partnership sought to redress the upward trend and adopt a data-driven approach of evidence-based prevention, early intervention and treatment approaches.

Methods:

A representative school-based survey of over 12,000 children and young people across the local authority was conducted using a suite of robust standardised tools. The innovation was collecting the same data, in the same way, from children and young people currently in receipt of services from the local authority. This was achieved in a two-step process: linking school-based survey data to administrative indicators of service utilisation and direct surveys of those in contact with services.

Results:

Data from the population as a whole identified a number of areas in which children and young people were developing relatively well (e.g. their physical health and educational skills and attainment) and areas that were a cause for concern (e.g. poor behaviour and negative community influences).

Data from the wider population, when combined with data from those in contact with existing services were striking: approximately 6% of the wider child population had multiple and serious impairments to their health and development, yet less than one in six of these were served by public systems.  Public systems were in contact with approximately 7% of the wider population, yet only one in ten of these had serious and multiple impairments, and about a third had no identified impairments to their health and development. 

Conclusions:

These data are, to our knowledge, the first example of data collected from both the wider child population and those served by existing services. They point to a stark mismatch between the needs of the wider population and the way in which services currently meet these needs. Data in Renfrewshire are currently contributing to evidence-based preventative and treatment strategies to redress this balance.