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Northern councils project tackles child poverty


By Lewis McBlane

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A RESEARCH project has published its recommendations on organising data to ease child poverty.

The research project, led by the Northern Alliance, a grouping of eight local authorities across the north of Scotland, and Unicef's Data for Children Collaborative, aims to help tackle the attainment gap by better organising data.

Currently, education professionals, including educational psychologists, head teachers and attainment advisors, say they struggle with multiple decade-old systems, missing information and a lack of analysis tools.

Northern Alliance Research Assistant Grant Murray said: “We are very pleased to be working in partnership with the Data for Children Collaborative.

"It’s a great example of how working together across council areas means we can look to address shared challenges.

“This work is allowing us to conduct in-depth analysis at a regional level, alongside local insight and challenges on the ground, drawing on potential new data sources and techniques.”

Within the new report, which aims to "democratise" access to data, the group sets its objective as bridging "the gap between access to information which can assist stakeholders to understand the attainment related gap around children due to poverty.

"The major goal here is to enable key stakeholders to use data in understanding the role of poverty in a child’s education."

To solve the problem, the report suggests setting up a new database, linked to existing resources and across council areas, which would also contain powerful data analysis and graphing tools.

The report says: "The problem can be addressed by leveraging a platform that caters to individual needs of the stakeholders and empowers them to share their learnings."

Laurence Findlay, regional improvement lead for the Northern Alliance and Aberdeenshire Council's Director of Education said: “This important work will help practitioners to think about the trends identified within their local context.

"This isn’t just about schools but all services that support children and families understanding how best they can work together to make a difference.

"Understanding the factors that present barriers to families and young people will help us to better support families to access the help they need to thrive.”

More information on the data research project can be found here.


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