***APPLICATIONS CLOSED ***

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Background & Detail:

The Northern Alliance is a regional improvement collaborative, spanning across and supporting 8 local authorities and their associated school settings to improve education and reduce the poverty related attainment gap. Within these settings, children, young people and their families live across a diverse range of urban and rural settlements.

The aim of this collaboration is to determine what data sources and analytical techniques best reflect the challenges of child poverty, and subsequently provide a means to assess the poverty related attainment gap as a result – which will further allow individual school settings, local authorities and other bodies to plan targeted interventions to reduce it.

Desired Outcome:

A publicly accessible report and tool which will be used by local authorities and school settings to understand child poverty within their settings, and effectively target children, young people and families who may benefit from support interventions.

Skill Sets:

Below are the broad skill sets needed to meet this challenge. It is likely that there may be additional skills required. We encourage applicants to propose capabilities that may lie out with the work packages below, as these will also be considered when forming a collaboration.

Data Engineering, Data Science, and Data Visualisation

A large proportion of this challenge is focused on identifying and working with both novel and traditional datasets and using data science techniques to develop a more realistic reflection of child poverty and, if feasible, identify actionable insights across areas of concerns. These outputs will need visualised in a manner that is understandable for a broad range of non-technical audiences.

Primary & Secondary Education and Socioeconomics

The team addressing this challenge question will need good understanding of the primary and secondary education systems, specifically within rural areas of Scotland. In addition, understanding the socioeconomic challenges that face these communities is fundamental when applying context to the problem. Working alongside the sponsor, Northern Alliance, the team will require skills in understanding novel indicators of child poverty in areas where data density is low or untraditional.

Funding Availability

For this challenge question, The Data for Children Collaborative can fund project partners a portion of up to £92,000.

We welcome applications from all sectors (private / public / third / academia) and encourage submissions from any team looking to do any in kind Data for Good work to develop their expertise. If possible, we encourage private sector partners to provide time pro-bono.

Timescales & Deliverability

Submission Deadline: Friday 11th September 2020

We would aim for the collaboration to begin work on a project by 1st November 2020. We envisage that a project addressing this challenge question should take approximately 6 months.

The deadline for submissions is 11 th September 2020 with the collaboration workshop taking place week commencing 21st September 2020.