Focus: Linked Administrative Education and Health Data. Scoping International Collaborations
Call for Manuscripts
Background
While there are challenges in linking administrative population-level datasets, there is much interest in discussing and identifying solutions to these challenges, especially concerning the linkage of education and health data. There are common themes across countries in terms of practical challenges such as balancing data custodian approval with ethical administration, managing record linkage alongside research time, addressing methodological issues like reconciling education and health identifiers, and tackling stakeholder challenges such as building capacity within data providers to navigate complex information governance and apply new learnings in practice.
Importance
Data from individual countries is immensely valuable. However, analyses that leverage data across multiple countries provide a more robust way to estimate the impact of differing policies, processes, and practices on children’s health and education outcomes. Cross-country collaboration not only yields novel insights but also serves as a natural platform for sharing best practices in data linkage, potentially enhancing research practices within individual countries. Yet, barriers to initiating cross-country collaborations remain significant, including financial, structural, and contractual hurdles. This Focus issue hopes to remove some of the informational barriers by showcasing the potential for collaboration, providing a steer on the data, but also considering the other issues including methods, ethics, and information governance.
Call
This call seeks to foster an understanding of and support the scoping of international collaborations. The goal is to model changes across time and nations to identify effective practices that improve outcomes for young people. We are asking authors to describe the linked administrative health and education data for their country or group of countries, and set out the scope for collaboration in terms of the data potential, research priorities, and capacity for collaboration.
Scope
Given the wide range of issues involved, manuscripts may focus on single countries, describe specific datasets or existing collaborations across multiple countries, discuss methodological approaches to harmonizing datasets, explore analytical approaches for cross-national research, address ethical, legal, and social considerations, or evaluate policy implications and impacts, among other possibilities.
Closing Date: 30th September 2025
Please be aware that IJPDS publishes articles as soon as they are ready rather than holding them and publishing them all at once. Manuscripts that are submitted early will be published more quickly.
General Information:
This special call covers all types of manuscript (see Author Guidelines/Manuscript Types).
Please refer to the Author Guidelines/How to Format your Manuscript for specifics on how to format your manuscript before completing your submission.
All manuscripts must be centred on Population Data Science, as per the scope of IJPDS.
To submit a manuscript: please log in to your existing account or register if you are a first-time submitter.
Editors
Dr Nick Bowden, University of Otago, New Zealand
Nick is a quantitative social scientist and is interested in using linked, population-level data to examine heath and non-health outcomes across the early life course for children and young people. His primary research focus has been on children with neurodevelopmental or mental health conditions.
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/nick-bowden-11930334
Dr Erin Early, Ulster University, Northern Ireland
Erin is a Lecturer in Social Policy at Ulster University. Her research interests are centred around social inequalities in educational outcomes, health and the family. Her work uses linked administrative data from Northern Ireland to explore these areas.
X: @Erin_Early_
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erin-early-86699780/
Associate Professor Kathleen Falster, School of Population Health, Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Associate Professor Kathleen Falster is an epidemiologist and Director of the New South Wales (NSW) Child E-Cohort Project that has linked health, education, child protection, public housing and justice data for more than 2 million Australian children born since 2001, and their parents. She works closely with policy and practice collaborators to generate evidence to inform and evaluate policy and service delivery initiatives to improve child population health.
Dr. Martin Flatø, Norwegian Institute of Public Health, Oslo, Norway
Martin Flatø is a demographer whose research focuses on interdependencies between education and health, using a comprehensive linkage of Norwegian registries with health, education, income and family data, as well as large health surveys.
Dr Michael Fleming, University of Glasgow, Scotland
Michael is a senior lecturer in Public Health and is interested in child and adolescent health, educational, and neurodevelopmental outcomes related to chronic conditions, early life factors, neonatal and childhood morbidity, and maternal/obstetric factors.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drmichaelfleming/
Dr Jen Keating, Cardiff University, Wales
Jen Keating is a developmental psychologist using administrative data to investigate education outcomes for children with additional learning needs. Her primary research background has involved working with children with neurodevelopmental conditions.
X: @jenkeatss
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-keating-886821117/
Dr. Kate Lewis, Research Fellow, UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, London, UK
Dr. Kate Lewis is a Research Fellow at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, where research leverages linked administrative education and health data to study the social determinants of early child health. She is currently involved in two major research programmes: the HOPE (Health Outcomes of young People throughout Education) study, examining variation in, and outcomes of, special education needs provision; and the Children and Families Policy Research Unit (CPRU), where she is investigating sociodemographic variation in mental health-related health contacts among adolescents. She has contributed to publications on topics such as inequalities in childhood respiratory illness, the association between parental migration history and childhood hospital admissions, and trends in emergency paediatric critical care.
Dr. Stine Kjær Urhøj, Assistant Professor, Department of Public Health, Section of Epidemiology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Dr. Stine Kjær Urhøj is an Assistant Professor specialising in perinatal and paediatric epidemiology, focusing on how conditions during pregnancy and early life influence child health. She contributes to research efforts such as the Scandinavian studies of COVID-19 in pregnancy (SCOPE) and leads projects on social inequalities in child health. Dr. Urhøj also chairs the Department of Public Health’s data infrastructure, the Public Health Database.
LinkedIn: Stine Kjær Urhøj
Professor Gissler Mika, THL Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, Finland
Research Professor Mika Gissler at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare has been working for more than 30 years with health and welfare registers and data linkage studies. His main research interests include perinatal and maternal health, migrant health, childhood and adolescent health, sexual and reproductive health, mental health, use of health care services and socioeconomic health differences. Increasingly, the studies have included a longitudinal component, usually from the prenatal period until adulthood.
Professor Irene Papanicolas, Brown University, USA
Irene is an expert in international performance comparisons of health systems. Irene leads the International Collaborative on Costs, Outcomes and Needs In Care (ICCONIC) housed at the Center for Health System Sustainability at Brown University School of Public Health. ICCONIC is a global partnership of 16 countries which uses comparisons of patient level linked data within national health systems to identify variations in care delivery and outcomes for high-need high-cost patients.
Dr Rhiannon Pilkington is an epidemiologist and Co-Director of BetterStart Health and Development Research, in the School of Public Health,University of Adelaide, Australia
Dr Pilkington has expertise in translational research, data analytics, and linked administrative data using the SA Better Evidence Better Outcomes Link Data (BEBOLD) platform which includes over 1 million children and their parents. Rhiannon leads a program of research focussed on generating evidence to underpin policy and practice that aims to ensure every child and family receives the support they need, when they need it.
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/rhiannon-pilkington-51039a58
Dr. Nathan Nickell, Max Rady College of Medicine, Department of Community Health Sciences, University of Manitoba, Canada
Dr. Nickel is an Associate Professor of Community Health Sciences and the Director of the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy, home to the Manitoba Population Research Data Repository a comprehensive whole-population repository comprising information from health, social services, public housing, income assistance, child protection, the education and justice systems. He is also on the Executive Team for Health Data Research Network of Canada and the Executive Sponsor for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility with a focus on data equity. Dr. Nickel partners with government, community groups, and Indigenous governments to co-create policy-focused actionable evidence to improve well-being.
Associate Professor Nieves Valdés, UAI, Chile
Nieves leads the "Reducing Childhood Malnutrition in Chile" project, collaborating with Chilean health and education authorities to construct a comprehensive longitudinal database. She holds a PhD in Economics and serves as an Associate Researcher at GobLab-UAI (https://goblab.uai.cl/en/) and an Adjunct Researcher at COES (https://coes.cl/). Her research focuses on evaluating public policies using microdata and microeconometric tools, particularly in health, education, and labor market domains, to enhance decision-making and foster well-being.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nieves-valdes-91846bb5/