Bringing ADR UK Fellows’ expertise together to answer the questions that matter

In this blog, ADR UK Senior Research Manager Lola Brookes reflects on the value of working closely with our Research Fellows and the role they play in helping us explore important policy questions using administrative data. She also looks ahead to the latest cohort and the growing community of researchers developing new insights from administrative data.

The best part of my job at ADR UK is working directly with our Research Fellows and seeing them realise incredible research programmes that have an impact on everyday lives for the better. 

Every fellowship starts with a research question, but what makes the programme particularly exciting is what happens around that question: bringing together researchers with different areas of expertise and experience, connecting them with colleagues across the research community, and exploring what linked administrative data can tell us about some of the most important issues facing society today. 

We’ve just welcomed our latest cohort of 17 Research Fellows, and I’m delighted that we’ve also launched a new webpage where you can find out more about the researchers, their projects and the datasets they are using. 

These fellows will be tackling a wonderfully diverse range of questions using our ADR UK and ADR England flagship datasets. They will be exploring issues including the pay gap experienced by unpaid carers, the impact of unaffordable housing on intergenerational mobility, experiences of children with special educational needs and disabilities, economic inactivity, and reoffending. Together, these projects demonstrate the breadth and depth of policy questions that can be explored using linked administrative data. 

But for me, the fellowship programme is about more than the individual projects. 

Turning administrative data into answers 

Administrative data has enormous potential to help us understand how people’s experiences unfold over time and across different parts of public services. By linking information held by different organisations, researchers can investigate questions that would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to answer at a large scale without the use of curated administrative data. 

For example, our newly funded fellow cohort includes researchers using the RAPID: Population interactions with employment, benefits and pensions dataset who will investigate local patterns of economic inactivity, health-related benefit claims and the labour market experiences of older workers. We also have fellows using linked education and health data to understand children’s experiences of special educational needs provision, and linked justice and education data to explore pathways into offending and reoffending. 

These complex policy questions need researchers who bring deep subject-matter expertise as well as strong methodological skills and resilience to working with complex data, and who span different sectors including academia and policy. The fellowship programme therefore gives researchers incredible opportunities to harness expertise for using our datasets to open up entirely new ways of understanding deep societal issues. And importantly, the benefit doesn’t stop with one research project. 

A community of researchers 

One of the most rewarding things about working closely with our fellows is seeing how much knowledge sharing happens within the community of researchers established by the ADR UK fellowship programme. 

Collective learning and shared experience elevates individual programmes of work. Facilitating and supporting shared learning for our fellows is a key part of my role. Researchers have to understand complex and somewhat messy data in an environment where ‘normal’ methods aren’t always possible. Using administrative data involves a lot of learning, from understanding the strengths and limitations of a particular dataset, to navigating access and governance, to thinking about how findings can be communicated to policymakers and other audiences. Nobody needs to work all of that out alone, and I get great joy in seeing fellows master skills, topics or questions together. 

We’ve seen this collaborative spirit in action in recent work by our fellows. For example, Dr Liliana Belkin and fellow researchers working with the Ministry of Justice and Department for Education linked dataset recently brought together researchers, practitioners and advocates to discuss what linked administrative data can tell us about young people’s pathways into criminal justice involvement. I’d love to see this kind of knowledge sharing grow. 

It also connects closely with the wider communities of practice developing across ADR UK. These communities provide spaces for researchers to share experience, build confidence and develop new collaborations around particular areas of administrative data research. It’s fantastic to see current and former fellows contributing to this wider research community alongside their fellowship work, with some even setting up communities themselves. 

Building a wider research ecosystem 

The fellowship programme is one part of a much bigger effort to build the capacity and expertise needed to make the most of administrative data for public good. 

We’re increasingly bringing together researchers, government departments, data owners and other experts to think about how our flagship datasets can be developed and used to address policy priorities. 

Our new Academic Lead teams are an important part of this. We’ve recently announced Academic Leads working with the Department for Work and Pensions and HM Revenue and Customs on economic data, as well as Academic Leads working with the Ministry of Justice through the Data First programme. Both teams will help strengthen the use of administrative data for policy-relevant research, build researcher capability and support active communities of researchers around these datasets. 

This is where the different strands of our work come together. We need high-quality data, we need researchers who know how to use it, we need strong connections between researchers and policymakers, and we need communities where people can share what they’ve learned and identify the next questions that need answering. 

Our Research Fellows continue to play a vital role within that ecosystem. 

Looking ahead 

I’m particularly excited about what the next few years will bring. We’ve now confirmed the next application windows for the ADR UK Research Fellowship scheme, with 15 fellowships planned for each of the 2027 and 2028 rounds. That means there is plenty more to come: more researchers bringing new ideas, more questions being explored, and hopefully more evidence that can help inform policy and practice across the UK. 

If you’re interested in finding out what our Research Fellows are working on, I’d encourage you to explore our new Research Fellows webpage. You can browse the latest projects, meet the researchers and discover the different ADR UK flagship datasets being used. 

And if you’re thinking about applying for a fellowship yourself, now is a good time to start thinking about the policy questions you’d like to explore and the data that could help you answer them. You can also email the ADR UK fellowships team at ADRFellowships@esrc.ukri.org with any questions. 

I’m looking forward to meeting further generations of fellows – and, as ever, to seeing what questions they ask of the data. 

Meet our research fellows