ADR UK (Administrative Data Research UK)
ADR UK is a partnership transforming the way researchers access the UK’s wealth of public sector data. Our aim is to provide better information for policy decisions to improve lives. We enable vital research that has the potential to lead to more effective public services by linking together administrative data held by different parts of government and making it available for research. ADR UK is initially a three-year investment supported by £44 million drawn from the National Productivity Investment Fund (NPIF).
The ADR UK Research Fellowship Scheme is supported by its Strategic Hub Fund, which has already been used to support invited bids to conduct research in line with identified strategic priorities around public service delivery and the creation of new de-identified linking datasets.
Research Fellowships are the next phase — to provide secure, funded academic access to these datasets for research projects with the potential for policy impact.
MoJ-DfE data linkage
The MoJ-DfE data linkage provides data on childhood characteristics, education outcomes and (re)-offending. The shared information consists of data on the educational characteristics of young people, from DfE, linked to data on their interactions with the criminal justice system, from MoJ.
The data in this share relates to those offenders with at least one record from 2000 or later, who were on the Police National Computer (PNC) at the end of 2017 and were matched to individuals on the National Pupil Database (NPD). Only offenders who were born on, or after 31st August 1985 were matched, because earlier groups do not have a realistic chance of matching. The earliest year shared will cover those aged 16 during the 2001/02 academic year, the oldest group likely to be present in the NPD.
This data linkage includes 20 DfE datasets, including data on academic achievement, pupil absence and pupil exclusions. It also includes 11 MoJ datasets, including data on offenders’ criminal histories, court appearances and time in prison. Each dataset has a unique ID variable that can be used to link across the datasets.
The MoJ-DfE data linkage is supported by data documentation to enable accredited researchers – across government and academia – to make the best of use of this data to improve our understanding of justice-system use. This data documentation provides an overview of the data, its structure, and a list of all variables included. Data documentation can be requested by emailing datalinkingteam@justice.co.uk
The data can be contextualised differently depending on the extract you request. For this Research Fellowship you are only able to apply for the DfE extract to contextualise it with the wider pupil population as offending data is not available in the ONS Secure Research Server.