Data and intelligence to help develop children's services post lockdown

As we begin to move on from lockdown, and try to shape services together to meet the needs of children and families over the longer-term, a rigorous and systematic approach to securing and analysing the situation will be needed. We need to take this unique opportunity to understand how children’s needs are being expressed in the radically different set of circumstances to date and how children’s social care services and their partners can respond to these needs in the longer-term.

Children's services partners need the capacity and desire to understand what both data and intelligence are telling us at this time, and the ability to redesign our services and our interventions in people’s lives to respond effectively to their needs. This discussion paper by IPC Associate Colin Green considers the potential of action research to help with this task and discusses how partners can use data and intelligence gathered systematically in this way to help them understand what is happening through this crisis, why changes have occurred, and what can be learned to help inform future services and activities.