Recommendation 7

Data sharing exercises need to be better used to understand the support vulnerable adolescents need. The poor outcomes experienced by vulnerable adolescents are often overlapping. For example, 72% of children sentenced in 2019–20 were assessed as having mental health concerns. And one in five of 16–24-year-old young people not in education, employment or training had a mental health condition in 2021. The Department for Education told us the overlaps between different vulnerabilities were complicated and that data sharing helped them identify overlapping groups of vulnerable adolescents who need support. But without better data sharing it is very hard to understand how all the different risk factors and vulnerabilities overlap and there is scope for better understanding of all overlapping needs. Departments have plans to improve the join up of different government data sets on vulnerable adolescents, including by linking anonymised health and education data. Whilst this is positive, the government does not have any clear plans for how the exercise will be used to better understand the risks that vulnerable adolescents face so that it can provide more targeted support. Recommendation: The Department for Education should take the lead in coordinating and setting out within six months an agreed approach to how departments will collect and use data to understand the pathways to adverse outcomes for vulnerable adolescents. Support for vulnerable adolescents 9 1 National and local leadership Introduction