Making Child Well-Being Data Work Hard: Getting from Data to Policy and Practice

Lots of child well-being data is collected but it is rarely exploited fully. In this article we set out the data that directors and service commissioners in children’s services need and methods to help them analyse it optimally. Using a case example we show how this will help with critical but complex tasks, such as choosing which outcomes to address, estimating realistic achievable change, designing services, and monitoring progress. We then discuss how to make the data work even harder, for example gathering well-being data on children in systems, improving the quality of service use information, and making data ‘live’ for practitioners via continuous feedback systems.