Community Catalyst

There is a growing demand to map the journeys of young people through school; further and higher education; employment; healthcare; criminal justice and other systems that are an intrinsic part of our social life. Doing so through administrative data provides a cost-effective approach to understand and address inequalities and improve outcomes for all young individuals.

But a combination of paucity, poor quality and impenetrable access regimes around data prevent a structured approach to address these issues. Administrative Data Research UK (ADR UK), Youth Futures Foundation (YFF) and Centre for Transforming Access and Student Outcomes in Higher Education (TASO) are co-funding an initiative that maps the data sources, identifies potential avenues for better data linking and creates a community of data users to answer important research questions on youth transitions.

Aims of the Youth Transitions Community Catalyst Project are to:

* Review the evidence base on youth transitions and identify gaps in our understanding of what works, to improve outcomes and reduce inequalities affecting young individuals.

* Conduct a review of the data landscape to record the as-is state of the data portfolio and using that as the basis explore a future model comprising greater linkages between datasets and improvements to the quality and coverage of existing data sets.

* Develop an ambitious research agenda aimed at addressing key gaps and developing high level strategies to address these gaps.

* Establishing a diverse and sustainable research community to promote knowledge sharing; engagement with the topic and the research agenda and opportunities to advance research using administrative data in this area.

* Build capacity for academic research by supporting researchers, at all levels, to conduct data analyses using administrative datasets.

* Address research priorities through allocation of embedded fellowships to enable impactful research using administrative data.

There is a substantial strand of research across economics, sociology and psychology that maps young people's pathways through various educational transitions, using techniques such as sequence analysis, much of which has traditionally been carried out with survey datasets. This project will support researchers in this space to address these questions using a variety of linked datasets, enabling unprecedented focus on the variation in these journeys among sub-groups that are otherwise too small in survey datasets.

This will build on limited examples of research that have used administrative datasets, but with significant scope for beneficiaries in this space.

As well as reaching a diverse range of academic beneficiaries in terms of substantive areas of interest, it is also important to highlight whom the project aims to reach in terms of existing engagement with administrative data. Specifically, the planned work looks to reach both:

* those who already work with administrative data, but who are looking to do so with different datasets or different settings

* perhaps especially importantly also those working on questions around youth transitions but who have not taken advantage of administrative data as part of their research approach up to this point, supporting and augmenting their existing research agendas and being part of efforts to build capacity, skills and expertise to continue their research capitalising on administrative data infrastructure.