UCL Institute of Child Health

ADR England works in partnership with the UCL Institute of Child Health (ICH), alongside the Department for Education, NHS England and the Office for National Statistics, to develop and enhance the Education and Child Health Insights from Linked Data (ECHILD) dataset. 

This collaboration brings together academic leadership, government data, and public engagement to create a nationally significant resource for understanding children’s health, education and wellbeing.

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Developing the ECHILD dataset

ECHILD links de-identified records for around 21 million children across education, health and social care. It is built from key datasets including the National Pupil Database and NHS hospital records, and is expanding to include additional health and contextual data.

Led by UCL ICH in collaboration with the Department for Education, NHS England, and the Office for National Statistics, the ECHILD project is designed to enable research that improves policy and practice across children’s health, education and wellbeing. By linking data across these domains, it allows researchers to explore how different aspects of children’s lives interact and shape outcomes over time.

Find out more about the dataset

Strengthening data quality and usability

A core part of the UCL ICH role is ensuring that ECHILD is research-ready. This includes maintaining detailed documentation, expanding metadata, assessing linkage quality, and evaluating potential biases over time.

The team also develops analytical tools and reusable methods to support consistent analysis across studies, helping ensure that ECHILD produces robust and comparable evidence for policy and practice.

Building capacity and public trust

UCL ICH plays a key role in enabling researchers to use ECHILD effectively. This includes providing technical and methodological support, improving access to metadata and documentation, and supporting high-quality research through secure access arrangements.

Alongside this, public engagement is a central part of the ECHILD programme. The UCL team works with young people, parents and advocacy groups to understand perspectives on the use of linked administrative data and to inform the direction of the research. This ongoing dialogue helps to ensure that ECHILD is developed and used in ways that reflect public expectations, strengthen trust, and maximise the value of data for society.