Australia's children

Data gaps

• Australia’s Welfare 2019 and Australia’s Health 2018 touch on a broad range of data gaps that impact reporting on the wellbeing of children.
• The AIHW’s discussion paper, Scoping enhanced measurement of child wellbeing in Australia discusses opportunities for enhancing measurement of child wellbeing, focuses primarily on the national data and information landscape.

Linkage

• A range of standalone AIHW reports highlight how linking across data sources can provide information on the pathways and outcomes of children in priority populations:
  • Young people in child protection and under youth justice supervision: 1 July 2013 to 30 June 2017
  • Young people in child protection and under youth justice supervision 2014–15
  • Young people in child protection and under youth justice supervision 2013–14
  • Vulnerable young people: interactions across homelessness, youth justice and child protection: 1 July 2011 to 30 June 2015
  • Educational outcomes for children in care: linking 2013 child protection and NAPLAN data
  • Overlap between youth justice supervision and alcohol and other drug treatment services: 1 July 2012 to 30 June 2016
• Australia’s welfare 2019: data insights also includes a feature article on linked data and its opportunities to improve our understanding of the wellbeing of children in Australia (see Chapter 8: An innovative linked data platform to improve the wellbeing of children—the South Australian Early Childhood Data Project).