Background
The British Academy of Childhood Disability Strategic Research Group (BACD SRG) is working with the Council for Disabled Children, part of the National Children’s Bureau, on the opportunities and challenges for research using linked datasets derived from health, education, social care and other public services. This work is funded by the Castang Foundation.
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill includes specific measures to improve the sharing of information about children between different agencies where it is in their best interests to do so. This includes introducing a Single Unique Identifier (SUI), which would require services to use a consistent code across the different data systems for which they are responsible and when sharing information about an individual child. However, the current provisions in the Bill do not make it explicit that the SUI can be used for reasons beyond operational safeguarding and welfare purposes. This has raised concerns, specifically, around whether or not the SUI can be used for research.
What is the problem?
Health, education, social care and other public services individually have large amounts of data that exist within their own organisations. At present, sharing and linking data about large numbers of children for research purposes is challenging for legal and practical reasons. Most data sharing and linkage takes many years to achieve. This reduces opportunities for the use of population level data held by public services from being safely used for timely research to improve the wellbeing and lives of children and families.
A workshop focusing on the potential for a Single Unique Identifier in improving data sharing and linkage for research was conducted in March 2025. The workshop was attended by 15 participants from 11 organisations; all had experience and expertise of linking data or working with linked data.
The full report on the findings and recommendations of the workshop can be viewed and downloaded below.
The BACD SRG's findings were cited in a report by Child of the North and partners, Connecting data: Intelligent and informed delivery to support every child to succeed, which was published in July 2026. The report calls for urgent action to address the need for better data sharing across children’s services.
BACD SRG SUI Workshop Report
