New children’s social care data cleaning scripts available on ECHILD GitHub Repository

Users of the Department for Education’s children’s social care datasets might be interested in new cleaning code developed by the ECHILD team. Hosted on GitHub, the code carries out cleaning operations on the child in need and children looked after data and results in a dataset that is more or less analysis-ready. The code was developed on a full copy of the two datasets, including children with and without Pupil Matching Reference numbers, meaning that non-ECHILD users may use the code also.

The code is provided with documentation that details each step. Users are encouraged to study this documentation and the code and, if necessary, amend it for their purposes. We encourage the research community to suggest improvements to create a shared resource for the benefit of all.

For more information, please contact the code’s author, Dr Matthew Jay or email the ECHILD team on [email protected].