Systemic Reviews

Our key driver is to improve the value provided by statistics. By value, we mean: are the statistics as valuable as they should be to society:

  • Are they sufficiently easy to find?
  • Are statistics relevant, and do they help the public understand important issues that society is grappling with?
  • Is the system responsive to the needs of users of statistics?

View our ongoing Systemic Reviews

Our ability to examine issues across the statistics landscape allows us to influence how the statistics system responds collectively to maximise quality and public value. When we want to improve public value of a set of statistics or examine a cross-cutting statistical issue (for example, data linkage or classifications) rather than one particular series, we will use a systemic review.

View our published Systemic Reviews

We have undertaken such reviews where an accumulation of evidence indicates there might be issues around gaps, overlaps, coherence, accessibility and other system-level issues. Systemic reviews often prove to be at their most useful when barriers to improvement and maximizing value exist around clarity of leadership, lack of collaboration or skills gaps. We can also use systemic reviews to highlight good practice and innovation in elements of public value, with a view to sharing lessons across the system.

To date, topics for our systemic reviews programme have been identified internally by our team, drawing on evidence from other aspects of our work that suggest there is a value in looking beyond specific sets of statistics. We test our proposals and seek ideas for new topics through our annual public consultation.