🧊Introduction

When too much data becomes a problem.

The Circumstances

The circumstances in which a child grows up strongly influences their outcomes across Scotland. Impacts of child poverty on the attainment of a child which need to be holistically assessed to better understand how it affects them. There are structural inequalities in the resources available to these children and the support provided to best utilise them.

Education and children services have been working on this problems for years to understand the challenges faced by a child growing in the different local contexts by attempting to follow the journey of a child through the system. One way they are trying to achieve this is by interacting with various sources of data and platforms available to them that help understand the same.

The Obstacles

Even with the knowledge of these challenges, the ability to work with information to solve these is not uniform across the stakeholders. They are faced with numerous obstacles ranging from access to data from all the various sources to ability to bring all the data from various sources together to lack of availability of important data to make key decisions in supporting the children.

The stakeholder are also working in real world settings where the data is not standardized across sources and they have to work with the limited time and data literacy available to them. To overcome these obstacles a central solution is required that enables data analysis, exploration and communication for the core responsibilities of the stakeholders while incorporating various sources of rich datasets available to them.

The Solution

To build a solution that encompasses all the requirements, all our research lies on the intersection of data, tech, design and social science to understand all aspects of the ecosystem and suggest solutions that strengthen the course of civic engagements.

Through our research we interacted with the stakeholders to understand their role in the ecosystem, the tools their are engaging with, their current xperiences and their aspirations for an ideal future. Through all these inputs were able to identify the preferences of various stakeholders and their requirements from a new solution.

This reports highlights our learnings from this work, and envisions a "one stop shop" platform where all stakeholders can come together and co-create solution to address the poverrty related attainment gap across the Northern Alliance Region of Scotland.