The Children and Young People’s Services Formula Review: final evaluation report

LG Futures, The University of Huddersfield and the University of Plymouth were
commissioned by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and the Department for Education (DfE) to develop a new model to show relative need to spend on Children and Young People’s Services across local authorities in England.
This formed part of the wider Review of Relative Needs and Resources (RRNR).
The model, discussed in detail in this technical report, is a multi-level model on two levels using individual child-level data from DfE’s National Pupil Database combined with children’s social care activity data and local area characteristics. The model predicts an individual’s social care needs, with predictions aggregated to an area level estimate to better reflect the differences in local authority populations. This makes the proposed model highly detailed and robust and allows the model to go further than the traditional
dependence on geographically aggregated data.