The Kids’ Environment and Health Cohort will be a new, national birth cohort of all children born in England since 2006. By linking data from birth, death, census, health, and education records to longitudinal national geo-environmental data, it will provide a resource for research into how the local environment affects children’s health as they grow up in England.
The Kids’ Environment and Health Cohort will be a research-ready, anonymised national birth cohort of all children born in England since 2006. It will securely hold administrative data (from birth, death, census, health, and education records) linked to longitudinal national geo-environmental data, allowing researchers to follow children and their environments from pregnancy and birth until adolescence.
The cohort will become a large data resource which will allow researchers to explore how children are affected by changes in environmental exposures over time, including children belonging to high-risk groups. The cohort will allow for cutting-edge research in environmental and social epidemiology, for example projects exploring long-term pandemic impacts or the effects of local climate change and Net Zero policies on children’s health and education.
By linking children’s data to their mothers’ medical records, researchers will be able to explore the pathways between exposures and events during pregnancy and the health and education of children later on, for example associations between exposure to air pollution during pregnancy and subsequent child health. It will also be possible to link children to their siblings, allowing for sibling-control studies which have the potential to reduce bias when analysing cohort data by controlling for family-level risk factors.
There are currently 585,000 live births in England annually and therefore the total cohort will include data for around 11 million children initially. This large sample size and national coverage will ensure sufficient statistical power and geographical variation for in-depth analyses.
When fully developed, the Kent Environmental Health Cohort (KEHC) will enable large-scale research into how children’s home, school and neighbourhood environments influence health, development and educational outcomes across England. It will support investigations of environmental exposures during pregnancy and childhood, inequalities in exposure, and the potential impacts of environmental and public policies.
Phase 1 provides linked data on birth records, mortality, maternal Census characteristics, and environmental exposures associated with the residential address recorded at birth. This allows researchers to examine relationships between environmental conditions, housing characteristics and early-life health outcomes.
In the future, KEHC is expected to support the development of routinely updated environmental indicators and the evaluation of policies related to housing, air quality, climate adaptation and net zero ambitions. The resource aims to generate policy-relevant evidence for researchers, policymakers and the public.
We continue to work closely with academic researchers and analysts from government departments and public agencies to guide KEHC’s development. Researchers interested in future applications of KEHC can contact the team at kenvh-cohort@ucl.ac.uk.
KEHC Phase 1 can support research such as:
