Summary

We found a lot to commend in the visibility of children and young people in the key statistical outputs we looked at. Clear attempts have been made to understand the impact of the pandemic on children and young people, separately to that of adults.

However, we found that analysis of outcomes for vulnerable children was lacking, and much of the data that did give children a voice came from non-official sources. We believe this to be broadly reflective of the wider landscape of statistics on children and young people.

We also found that there are some specific barriers to meeting user needs for statistics on children and young people, such as the impact of sample sizes on granularity.

We have highlighted where improvements can be made, for example, around the surveying of children and young people’s voice directly in official sources.