How ADR England’s Community Catalysts can help shape your fellowship proposal

If you’re planning to apply for our funding opportunity for ADR UK Research Fellowships, you might be looking for ways to make your proposal impactful. Karen Powell, ADR UK’s Head of Research Strategy and Commissioning, explains how insights from our ADR England Research Community Catalysts can help you align your project to fill key evidence gaps.

At ADR UK, our mission is simple but ambitious: to unlock the potential of linked administrative data to deliver insights that improve lives, society, and the economy. Our research fellowships are one important way of enabling policy-relevant, impactful research. But to advance the wider administrative data research landscape we’ve also co-funded two Community Catalyst projects, to build capacity and develop diverse research communities.

This year, fellowship applicants have a unique opportunity: to build on the work of our Community Catalysts and respond to the research agendas they’ve developed. These agendas represent months of consultation, analysis, and collaboration—and they’re designed to help researchers focus on the questions that matter most to policymakers and practitioners.

What are Community Catalysts?

Community Catalysts are pilot investments co-funded by ADR UK and What Works Centres. Unlike our dataset-specific initiatives, these projects take a thematic approach, focusing on big societal challenges where linked data can make a difference. They bring together leadership across multiple datasets and connects researcher with policymakers and practitioners around shared priorities.

We currently have two catalysts:

• Children at Risk of Poor Outcomes (with Foundations)
• Youth Transitions (with TASO [Transforming Access and Student Outcomes in Higher Education] and Youth Futures Foundation).

Their role is to create communities, build capacity, and provide strategic leadership to drive impactful research. They add a unique, theme-led approach to our wider portfolio of capacity-building activities, which also includes training courses, user groups and synthetic data resources; find out more on our learning hub.

Why these themes?

We chose these topics because they align with multiple ADR England flagship datasets, which means there’s potential for research using our data to make a real difference to these issues. These themes reflect pressing policy priorities, where evidence gaps can have real-world consequences. Our co-funding partners share our commitment to turning research into practice. Both areas —supporting children and young people — are critical for shaping better futures and tackling inequalities in the UK.

What have they achieved so far?

The catalysts have delivered a huge amount in a short time. Each has:

• Conducted literature reviews and stakeholder consultations to map what we know and what we don’t.
• Identified priority evidence gaps where linked administrative data can make a difference.
• Published research agendas that highlight these gaps and show how ADR UK’s flagship datasets can help address them.
• Delivered training, resources, and events to help researchers navigate complex data.
• Established diverse communities of practice of 300–500 members, creating spaces for collaboration and interpretation of research.

You can explore these agendas and resources below:

Children at Risk of Poor Outcomes Youth Transitions

What’s next?

The next phase, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council,  will focus on using linked data to evaluate public policy — a cost-effective way to understand what works and what doesn’t. This matters because millions of pounds of public money are spent on interventions which don’t always go through robust evaluation. Linked data can reveal not only intended outcomes but also unintended consequences across different areas of life.

Imagine being able to show which costly interventions deliver real benefits—and which may have no effect or even adverse impacts. That’s the kind of insight these datasets can provide, and the catalysts will be working to support methodological approaches that make this possible.

How can fellowship applicants benefit?

If you’re applying for one of our fellowships, aligning your proposal with these research agendas means your work will address high-priority evidence gaps endorsed by a wide range of stakeholders. Depending on your project, the catalysts may even help connect you with engaged stakeholders who can inform your research or put your findings to use. This means you don’t need to replicate months of consultation; you can build on it.

To help you understand how your project might fit into these research agendas, our Community Catalysts recently ran a webinar for fellowship applicants.

Watch the webinar

Aligning with our Community Catalysts isn’t the only route to a successful fellowship application. We have a wide range of flagship datasets covering diverse policy areas, and not all are relevant to these agendas. Other ways to make sure your proposal is policy-relevant include:

• Responding to dataset-specific priority research questions; you can find links to all of these alongside the relevant dataset in the funding opportunity.
• Considering government areas of research interest or missions.

And remember: always speak to the dataset specific experts to confirm your question is feasible.

Apply for a fellowship

Final thought

Our catalysts have laid the groundwork—building communities, clarifying priorities, and creating resources. Now it’s over to you. Explore the agendas, connect with the catalysts, and help us turn data into insights that make a real difference.

For more details, check out:

• Apply for an ADR UK Research Fellowship 2025
• Watch an applicant webinar from the Community Catalysts
• My previous blog introducing Community Catalysts

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