The Kids’ Environment and Health Cohort will be linked in two stages.
For the Stage 1, the following data will be linked:
For stage 2 of KEHC, the aspiration is to link the cohort to health and education data. This is subject to approvals from NHS England and the Department for Education.
What can the Kids’ Environment and Health Cohort be used for?
The Kids’ Environment and Health Cohort will help researchers understand how children’s health and education are affected by the places where they live and go to school. By bringing together information about children’s surroundings — such as air quality, green spaces, housing, and local services — researchers will be able to spot what helps children thrive, live in good health and achieve at school.
The findings will give government departments, local councils, and families better evidence about what works. They will also show whether current housing, environmental, and planning policies are actually improving children’s lives, and where changes might be needed to make communities healthier and fairer for all children.
Read about our demonstrator projects here.
Keeping data safe
Researchers will not be able to see exactly where children live or go to school. Instead, the ONS will use a secure system of linking data from birth records, and safely de-identifying the data before it is made available to researcher. This allows the Kids’ Environment and Health Cohort to be matched with other environmental data over time, for example, information about air quality, green spaces, or traffic levels in different neighbourhoods, without revealing children’s actual addresses to researchers.
ONS will match environmental data to home and school postcodes or unique property reference number (UPRN), a code used to identify every dwelling in England. All postcodes, UPRNs, and school location identifiers will be stored securely and separately by the ONS, and will never be accessible to researchers.
Researchers will only see the final, linked data showing environmental conditions around where children live and go to school, not the locations themselves. This ensures children’s privacy is fully protected while still allowing important research on how their environments affect their health and education.
Once linked, the data in the cohort will be stored in the subject to approval from data owners. The ONS Secure Research Service is a national trusted (UK Statistics Authority accredited) research environment, where accredited researchers will access the de-identified data.
