Young Ireland - Understanding Children's Lives

It’s important that we have the best possible picture of the challenges children and young people are facing in Ireland so everyone working in this area can design and implement effective solutions. This is especially important for those who may be vulnerable, and those groups where data may not be as readily accessible.

By developing a good picture of children and young people’s lives, including what is going well and not well, we can focus our attention where it is needed and solve the problems that are most urgent. Young Ireland was strongly informed by recent data and evidence, and every action in the framework addresses a problem which is grounded in data and evidence.

The Children and Young People’s Indicator Set provides an overview of reliable, published data about the lives of children and young people. It tracks progress across each of the 5 National Outcomes set out in Young Ireland, with relevant indicators which, taken together, give an idea of how children and young people are doing. The indicator set identifies and combines data from a range of sources, including the CSO’s open data platform, PxStat; Eurostat’s data browser; Tusla’s open data hub;and the annual Healthy Ireland survey.This resource is updated annually as new data becomes available.

The annual Item was unpublished or removed (SONC) report provides a comprehensive picture of our children's lives. SONC is based on the National Set of Child Well-Being Indicators published in 2005. The report was first published in 2006. SONC presents key information on children’s health, behavioural and educational outcomes, and their relationships with their parents and their friends. SONC provides the most up-to-date data on the National Set of Child Wellbeing indicators, through charting the wellbeing of children in Ireland; tracking changes over time; and benchmarking progress in Ireland relative to other countries.

It is widely used as a resource by policy makers, the research community and civil society, and aims to inform government policy on children, young people and families. Click here to read the 2024 edition of the Report.

A centralised platform hosting an agreed set of indicators sourced from relevant published reports, was developed by the DCEDIY and Tusla through the What Works initiative. Under the What Works initiative, DCEDIY worked with Tusla to build an interactive area-based geo-mapping system to provide information for policy-makers, service providers, Tusla management, practitioners, and information managers to support good decision-making regarding service design and delivery.

These developments contribute to the broader Public Service Data Strategy 2019-2023 which sets out a vision, along with a set of actions, on how we can improve our use of data to support a more joined-up, efficient and effective government.

However, government is not the only collector or user of data on children and young people. Through their work, our non-statutory partners also collect and use data to understand and address the needs of their service users and improve provision. DCEDIY supports civil society through the What Works initiative. DCEDIY also recently launched the What Works Evidence Hub to increase access to effective prevention and early intervention programmes by making the best evidence on what works available to policy-makers, service commissioners, providers and other audiences.

As well as the Children and Young People’s Indicator Set, there are also other sources of data on the lives of children and young people such as Growing Up in Ireland the national longitudinal study of children and young people. This study follows different groups of children and young people at different points of their lives, and more information about it, and the latest releases, are available online here.

Click here to view reports and publications relating to Young Ireland, including the data and research that informs the development and work of the policy framework.

The Young Ireland Research Roadmap promotes and supports the use of high-quality research by policy makers working to improve the lives of children and young people.

The objectives of the Roadmap are:

1. Promote Knowledge Synthesis: Ensure that existing research is available to policymakers in a useful form.
2. Support Novel Research: Support new research where gaps exist.
3. Enhance Capacity and Skills Building: Create structures and processes that equip policymakers to access existing data; develop research questions; and that allow policymakers to use the evidence emerging from research.
4. Maximise the Use of Existing Knowledge and Data: Harness existing data on children and young people and increase knowledge about other research being conducted.

The actions detailed in the Young Ireland Research Roadmap will be led by the Research and Evaluation Unit and delivered over the four-year period 2025 to 2028.

The Roadmap was informed in part by a landscape and gap analysis of research on the lives of children and young people, which we have published alongside the Roadmap here .