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Child-focused, data-driven: Learning from youth justice to improve family justice data

Today The Nuffield Family Justice Observatory has published a report and supporting briefing paper which explores lessons that the family justice system could learn from the way data is used in the youth justice system.


Despite some improvements, professionals and practitioners working to improve services and outcomes for families and children in the family justice system are often doing so without access to critical data.  

Without timely, robust data, it is impossible to understand the experiences of those who interact with the system, how services are functioning, or to hold the system to account for delivering fair and equitable outcomes. 

The youth justice system provides a helpful point of comparison when examining approaches to child-centred data, improving data and using data.  

The report looks at three areas: the use of performance monitoring data, examples for data improvement and published datasets to highlight differences between family and youth justice statistics.   

It recommends the need for focus away from efficiencies toward data focused on children’s and families’ experiences of proceedings and their outcomes. For data to drive real change, it must reflect what professionals and families need to know as well as closing critical data gaps. 

The aim of this report is to encourage family justice professionals to learn from good practice and innovation in the youth justice system, to know that new data collection is possible, to help achieve positive outcomes for children and their families. 

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