Applications for the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Research Excellence Awards 2024 are now closed. Voting for the People's Choice Award will open soon. On this page you can learn more about this year's award categories and the judging panel.
1. Background
Each year, around 300 projects gain approval to access the secure data held within Office for National Statistics (ONS) Trusted Research Environments for statistical research. The research outcomes inform a diverse range of important economic and societal issues. Everything from inequalities in education and the cost of living through to insights on new linked health datasets.
The awards recognise the excellent and innovative analyses carried out and promote best practice research methodologies and data matching or linking. The awards promote greater awareness and understanding of the data made available and the public good achieved from statistical analyses of the data.
For the first time, this year's awards will accept submissions from research projects carried out within the Integrated Data Service (IDS). The IDS is a cross-government project, with the ONS leading on its delivery, working closely with partners across government, the devolved administrations and the research community.
Awards will be decided by an independent judging panel made up of experts from across the research community. Learn more about the judges on this webpage.
The virtual awards ceremony, on Wednesday 4 December 2024, will bring together researchers, data owners and government representatives to celebrate the great work taking place across the research community. Sign up to the event on the Eventbrite website.
2. Awards
This year, we are delighted to offer six Award categories.
Impact of Analysis Award
The Impact of Analysis Award will celebrate research in an Office for National Statistics (ONS) managed data service that has had a significant impact on the public good.
Impact of Analysis Award – Collaboration with Government
This award will recognise successful collaboration between researchers and at least one UK government department or devolved administration.
Secure Data Creation Award
This award will celebrate the creation, linkage or engineering of, or improvement to, the accessibility or availability of secure data already, or intended to be, available in a Trusted Research Environment managed by the ONS, the Secure Research Service (SRS), or the Integrated Data Service (IDS).
Organisational Excellence Award
The Organisational Excellence Award will recognise departments and teams who have gone above and beyond for their users in facilitating access to secure data provided by ONS data services.
ADR UK Research Excellence Award
This award recognises innovative and impactful research funded by Administrative Data Research UK (ADR UK) carried out in any Trusted Research Environment.
3. ONS People's Choice Award
The People's Choice Award includes the top scoring eligible entries across all of the Research Excellence Awards categories. There follows more information on the entries.
1. Early adult outcomes for suspended and excluded pupils
This research demonstrates that young people who are suspended at secondary school experience a range of poorer outcomes in late adolescence and early adulthood compared with their peers. Read the highlighted publication from the Education Policy Institute to learn more.
2. Emergency department presentations with suicidal ideation: a missed opportunity for intervention?
This research investigates whether emergency department presentations with suicidal ideation represent missed opportunities for life-saving interventions. Read the highlighted publication from the United States National Library of Medicine to learn more.
3. Ethnic inequalities in the Criminal Justice System
This research addresses knowledge gaps on wide ethnic disparities in the Criminal Justice System highlighted in recent government reports. It provides evidence on the extent and drivers of ethnic disparities, identifying effective ways of addressing them. Read the highlighted publication from the British Journal of Criminology to learn more.
4. Insights from linked education and justice data: educational attainment and criminal offending
This project uses linked data to evaluate how changes in pupil attainment over time might be associated with offending. Read the highlighted publication from the International Journal of Population Data Science to learn more.
5. Growing up in Kinship care
Researchers linked care experience data to health, education and child protection data to provide new insight into the Kinship care experiences of children in Scotland. Read the highlighted publication from the Scottish Centre for Administrative Data Research (PDF, 4.88MB) to learn more.
6. CovPall-Connect. Evaluation of the COVID-19 pandemic response in palliative and end-of-life care and understanding the social determinants of place of death
This research provided the first evidence that the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic exacerbated socioeconomic inequalities in where people die. Read the highlighted publication from Pallative Medicine (PDF, 830KB) to learn more.
7. How do firms cope with economic shocks in real time?
This work builds a new toolbox, of high-frequency linked microdata, to estimate firm responses to economic shocks in near real-time. Read the highlighted publication from the Competition and Markets Authority to learn more.
8. Understanding the intersections between ethnicity, care experience and youth justice involvement
This project uses newly linked administrative datasets from the Ministry of Justice and Department for Education to explore how children who have been in and out of home care and children from racially minoritised backgrounds are disproportionately more likely to enter the youth justice system. Read the highlighted publication from ADR UK to learn more.
9. Understanding geographical mobility of young people in England
This work helps better understand how place plays a role in producing, attracting and retaining young people with advanced qualifications. Read the highlighted publication from the Office for National Statistics to learn more.
10. Education and Child Health Insights from Linked Data (ECHILD)
The ECHILD project has enabled linkage of multi-agency data to provide a more holistic understanding of children's lives and how they interact with services spanning health, education and social care. Learn more on the ECHILD website.
11. Virus Watch
This work led to the creation of a new linked dataset in 2020, that provides evidence on which public health approaches are most effective in reducing transmission, and investigating community incidence, symptoms and transmission of coronavirus (COVID-19) in relation to population movement and behaviours. Learn more on the Virus Watch website.
12. Ministry of Justice Data First offender assessment dataset
This work forms part of the Data First data linking programme led by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), and captures a broad spectrum of risks and needs of adult offenders. Learn more on the Ministry of Justice website.
13. Secure data access services at the London School of Economics
Since 2013, the London School of Economics (LSE) has been developing secure data access services for their own users and also facilitating access to Office for National Statistics (ONS) data via LSE to users from other higher education institutions, the non-governmental organisation sector and businesses. Learn more on the London School of Economics website.
14. Department for Education data ownership and data sharing
The Department for Education (DfE) have taken a leading role in providing access to critical data across government and to external researchers while continuing to safeguard children's privacy and maintain public confidence in DfE's processes. Learn more on the Department for Education website.
15. Data Research, Access and Governance Network (DRAGoN)
This is a multi-disciplinary research group that aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia, think-tanks, industry and government to help improve tools, operations and skills in relation to output checking in Trusted Research Environments. Learn more on the University of the West of England website.
Please cast your votes before midnight on Sunday 24 November 2024.
4. Meet the 2024 judging panel
The judging panel for the 2024 Office for National Statistics (ONS) Research Excellence Awards will include a diverse range of expertise to evaluate your submissions, bringing with them experience from across the research community.
Julian McCrae
Julian leads the Integrated Data Service (IDS) Strategy at the ONS. He is responsible for ensuring the emerging Service meets its core goal – the greater availability of ready-to-use linked data for public good analysis.
He began his career at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), where he led the IFS's research programme on corporate taxation. In other roles he has taught public economics at University College London and helped expand the public policy practice at Frontier Economics.
Julian has held the position of Deputy Director of the Institute for Government as well as Deputy Director of the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit. Julian's experience in government also includes two spells at HM Treasury and a period at the Department for Work and Pensions.
Emily Oliver
Emily is responsible for leading on training and capacity building activities within the Administrative Data Research UK (ADR UK) Strategic Hub to drive up the use of administrative data for research.
By engaging with stakeholders including data owners across government departments, researchers and supervisors, and with those working within Trusted Research Environments, she has devised a training strategy comprising courses led by experts, online resources and ADR UK's first cohort of PhD studentships.
In addition, she chairs a cross-organisational Synthetic Data Working Group and is coordinating a suite of projects exploring synthetic data as a tool for smoothing the researcher journey to using administrative data.
Prabhat Vaze
Prabhat has over 20 years experience as an economist working in consultancy, government departments and academia. His areas of expertise are analysis for programme and project management, strategy development, economic appraisal and evaluation of policies using complex datasets. He has worked in productivity economics, defence, transport and official statistics. His studies using the ONS Secure Research Service have focused on evaluating policies to support businesses.
Before setting up Belmana, during a decade in the UK senior civil service, Prabhat was Director of Analysis at the Ministry of Defence, Chief Economist at the ONS and senior economist at the Department for Transport.
Tom Jackson
Tom has previously worked as a government social researcher at the Ministry of Justice, where his team won the Linked Administrative Data Award at the ONS's Research Excellence Awards in 2022.
This work used linked administrative datasets from across the justice system and with other government departments to provide powerful new insights on justice system users, their pathways, and outcomes across a range of public services. Tom now works at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office as a climate change monitoring and evaluation adviser.
Graham Knox
Graham is head of the Data Services Unit within the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). His teams support the data needs of DWP analysts and lead on data sharing for research.
He has been a government statistician for over 20 years, having spent much of his career in the Department for Education (DfE) and DWP.
Graham has carried out more traditional statistician-type roles but now spends more of his time focusing on wider data sharing and how we can enable access to DWP data for research, working closely with data-sharing colleagues across government, the ONS and ADR UK.
5. More information
If you have any questions about the 2024 ONS Research Excellence Awards, please email REA2024@ons.gov.uk.