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UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health

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Legal Epidemiology Group

The UCL Legal Epidemiology Group is an interdisciplinary research group based at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health in the Population, Policy & Practice Programme.

What do we do?

We carry out epidemiological research with the aim of better understanding how the law operates on a day-to-day basis and how it affects the health and well-being of the population. We specialise in the use of population-level quantitative methodology to analyse administrative data sets including those from the courts, health, social care and education sectors.

What is legal epidemiology?

We define legal epidemiology as the branch of epidemiology that seeks to bridge the gap between the fields of legal and health and well-being research in order to provide answers to policy- and practice-relevant research questions. It aims to contribute to the understanding of how legal processes operate on a population level and the short- and long-term outcomes for the individuals whom they affect, in all domains of health and well-being. Promoting the use of empirical methods to understand law and effectively disseminating research findings to improve the quality of policy and individual-level decision-making are both central to its approach.

Legal epidemiology is not just about the law of health or healthcare. Instead it recognises that a host of upstream, social factors influence health and well-being across life. As such, legal epidemiology seeks to understand law in all its manifestations in society. You can read more about our conceptualisation of legal epidemiology in Jay MA. Legal epidemiology, evidence-informed law and administrative data: new frontiers in the study of family justice. In: Creutzfeldt N, Mason M, McConnachie K. Routledge Handbook of Socio-Legal Theory and Methods. London: Routledge, 2019.

Group members

  • Matthew A Jay
  • Georgina Ireland
  • Claire Grant
  • Louise Mc Grath-Lone
  • Linda Wijlaars
  • Ruth Gilbert

 

    Current projects

    Understanding the healthcare needs of mothers involved in care proceedings

    This project has linked administrative health and courts data for the first time, in order to explore the potential for healthcare services to reduce the chances of mothers or children becoming involved in care proceedings, once or multiple times.

    The first part of the project linked Cafcass public law data to mental health service use data in South London held in the Clinical Record Interactive Search (CRIS) database, and was completed in 2021 (see publications below). The data from this linkage was used to describe the frequency, type and severity of mental health problems in mothers involved in care proceedings, patterns of mental health service use before and after involvement with the family courts and investigate characteristics associated with subsequent involvement with the family courts (particularly recurrent vs non-recurrent proceedings).

    This work found that in South London around two-thirds (66%) of mothers involved with care proceedings had a record of contact with mental health services between April 2007 and March 2019. Amongst women who had a record of contact with mental health services, four-fifths (79%) were known to mental health services prior to the initiation of care proceedings, around 1 in 5 women had a diagnosis of schizophrenia spectrum disorders (19%) and personality disorders (21%), and 1 in 3 (33%) had a record of substance misuse. Approximately 20% of women involved in an initial set of care proceedings and known to mental health services prior to initiation will return to court with a subsequent infant within eight years.

    During part two of the study we have linked Cafcass public law data to national hospital data (Hospital Episode Statistics) for all women giving birth in England. The linked data will be used to identify mothers involved in care proceedings and allow us to follow them up in their anonymised hospital records to understand their health needs and hospital contacts before, during and after court proceedings.  

    The aim of these analyses are to identify whether additional inputs from healthcare services could reduce the chance of a mother or child becoming involved in care proceedings, and improve their health and welfare outcomes. In addition to generating substantive outputs, the data linking process will be both ground-breaking and methodologically challenging.  All linkage algorithms would be made available for future research, and a methodological paper will be produced to inform future studies.

    Publications

    Funder: The Nuffield Foundation

    Dates: February 2017 to May 2024

    Further information: Contact Dr Georgina Ireland

    Past projects

    Public and private family law: understanding the overlap

    Why was this research needed?

    Within the context of the Children Act 1989, a distinction is frequently drawn between public and private family law. The public branch concerns state interventions in the lives of families in connection with child protection. Local authorities (LAs) have duties to safeguard the welfare of children in their areas and a range of powers at their disposal to discharge this duty. By contrast, the private domain is characterised by disputes between private parties concerning the upbringing of a child. This typically occurs in the context of relationship breakdown (whether or not there is a divorce or dissolution of a civil partnership). Recourse to the court is available where the parties cannot agree between themselves, with section 8 orders (e.g. child arrangements orders) being the most common private law orders. It has been suggested, however, that this neat dichotomy breaks down in practice and in fact many cases are a hybrid of both. The extent to which this occurs, and the extent to which children who come through the private system return to it or the public system is currently unknown. Our study therefore seeks to answer the question: to what extent is there an overlap between English private and public family child law?

    What did we do?

    We had been granted access by the Ministry of Justice to its Children in Family Justice Data Share. This contains linked data from the family courts administrative database named FamilyMan, Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass) data, Children Looked After data and National Pupil Database data. Using these data we quantified the extent to which children who are involved in private family law proceedings return to court or are otherwise found to be in the public family law system.

    Publications

    Jay MA, Pearson R, Wijlaars L, Olhede S, Gilbert R. Using administrative data to quantify overlaps between public and private children law in England: report for the Ministry of Justice on the Children in Family Justice Data Share pilot. Download the full report or a one-page summary.

    Further information

    Contact Matthew Jay

    Understanding local authority variation in receiving children into care

    Why was this research needed?

    The number of children in England who become ‘looked-after’ (i.e. children who are in the care of their local authority or accommodated by children’s social care services) has continued to rise in recent years. However, there is large variation among local authorities and some have even seen a decrease in the number children becoming looked-after each year.

    What did we do?

    This analysis looked at how much of this variation can be explained by risk factors for entry into care. In particular, we explored the impact of poor health outcomes among mothers such as mental ill health, substance misuse and experience of violence or adversity on the variation in the number of children received into local authority care.

    Publications

    Exclusion from secondary schooling of children receiving social care and special educational needs in England

    Why was this research needed?

    Every child has a fundamental human right to education, enshrined in a range of international human rights instruments. In England, all school-aged children must receive full-time and effective education which, for most children, occurs through state-funded schools. Some children, however, miss out on their education through off-rolling and formal exclusion. Off-rolling occurs where a school removes a child from their roll for some illegitimate purpose, such as to game league tables. Children can be formally excluded, either temporarily or permanently, as a disciplinary measure. It is known that children otherwise vulnerable to poor outcomes, such as children looked after, children in need and children who get special educational needs services, are more likely to miss out but evidence as to the extent to which this occurs is limited.

    We therefore aimed to use whole-of-England data to quantify the extent to which children leave school early and are excluded across the entirety of secondary school and how this varies geographically. In particular, we aimed to quantify the extent to which children in need, children on child protection plans, children looked after and/or children who get special educational needs services (including children who previously held these statuses) are more at risk of these adverse outcomes and exclusion.

    What did we do?

    We used the National Pupil Database linked to data from children’s social care on children in need and children looked after.

    Publications

    The research team

    Dr Matthew Jay. The project was supervised by Prof Ruth Gilbert.

     

    Contact

    For any queries about the Legal Epidemiology Group, please contact Dr Matthew Jay.

    Publications