Data can be used to understand many aspects of the lives of children and their families, including how they interact with government over their lifetimes and identify where there are opportunities to do better. New Zealand’s Social Wellbeing Agency has used the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) to provide data and insights on child and youth well-being to government, with a focus on children and youth with high needs.
New Zealand’s Integrated Data Infrastructure: Using data to identify need and improve the well‑being of children and youth
Abstract
New Zealand’s Social Wellbeing Agency used the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) to provide data and insights that enable a better understanding of the needs and life experiences of children and young people who have high needs and those who offend. The IDI is a secure research database that brings together data collected by government agencies, including records from the criminal justice, education, health, and care and protection systems (for example, systems and services that provide protection to vulnerable children and young people). The data and insights provide decision-makers with evidence on the ‘who’ – identifying those with the highest need, ‘what’ – what are their characteristics and experiences, ‘where’ – which regions have the highest need, and ‘what works’ – what works to effectively improve their outcomes.
The Agency also tested a new evaluation method for evaluating Alternative Education Services and Teen Parent Units using the IDI. The evaluation used propensity score matching to compare the well-being outcomes of children and young people with similar characteristics but who had not received these services.
The Agency used the IDI to create a measure of need based on well-being factors that are highly correlated to offending behaviour. Using this measure, the cohort of young people in Aotearoa New Zealand who turned 18 in 2020 were placed into four groups based on their exposure to hardship and disadvantage: the very high need group (1% of young people with the highest need according to the developed measure), the high need group (the next 9% of young people), the moderate needs group (the next 10% of young people), and the low needs group (the bottom 80% of young people in terms of need).
The research examined the lives of the young people in each of these groups to understand their involvement with youth crime. It found that a small group with most exposure to hardship and disadvantage commit the majority of youth crime (See Figure 1).
The Social Wellbeing Agency also analysed how children with the highest needs (children and young people who need extra support for their learning which includes learning difficulties, disadvantage, physical or mental health, or behaviour) are identified and can be better supported in the education system. Insights were based on data from the education and health systems (in the IDI) to see how those systems identified need in different ways, and how many children might have high additional learning needs that are not currently supported in education. Findings from this research informed the Ministry of Education’s work on the Highest Support Needs Review.
Additionally, the Social Wellbeing Agency used the IDI to look at the characteristics, life experience and family and community context for Alternative Education young people and compared their outcomes with a matched group of young people with similar life experiences and contexts. This analysis shows young people in Alternative Education have significant needs and have had disrupted and traumatic histories. Their outcomes are substantially worse than the total population but also meaningfully worse than the matched group they were compared with. This report is part of the Education Review's Office wider research and evaluation project to understand the quality of provision in Alternative Education.
The IDI was also used to evaluate the impact of Teen Parent Units (TPUs), that provide wrap-around support to pregnant or parent school students. TPUs are established in collaboration between a secondary school and a local early childhood education provider. The aim of TPUs is to improve educational engagement and achievement, and promote future participation in education, training, and employment. The Social Wellbeing Agency used data in the IDI to look at birth outcomes and early childhood outcomes and outcomes up to the age of 8 for children of TPU participants. The IDI allowed the Agency to include both later employment outcomes for mothers who participated in TPUs, as well as early life outcomes for their children. This evaluation builds on an earlier evaluation carried out in 2017 and was used to further test the methodology of using research data sets to provide insight on the impacts of programmes and policies. Similar to the Alternative Education Services evaluation, propensity score matching was used for identifying a group of teenage mothers who have similar life experiences to TPU participants, but who did not participate in TPUs.
Findings from these research projects informed Government decisions over the course of 2022 to strengthen support for young people who had offended, particularly in regions where analysis showed need was highest. These insights have already been used by policymakers and decision-makers to better respond to the additional needs of children and young people through improved services and programmes.
Further, the propensity score-matching IDI evaluation method tested could be used more widely to overcome barriers to evaluation and to contribute to a stronger evidence base of what works to support well-being in Aotearoa New Zealand.
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