Children and young people who arrive in the UK seeking asylum or as refugees—including those alone—face lifelong health, education, and social care disadvantages that current policies and services fail to address. This project tackles a specific gap: no one has systematically asked these young people what they need, nor tested whether existing interventions actually work for them. The team—combining clinicians, lawyers, data scientists, and young people with lived experience—will mine routine administrative data to map outcomes, use creative workshops to co-design meaningful measures of success, and review UK law against the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. If successful, the work will produce a detailed blueprint for a larger research programme. That programme could then develop and test interventions—in healthcare, schools, and social services—that are proven to reduce inequities for refugee and asylum-seeking children. Because the methods are designed to be generalisable, the same approaches could be adapted for other marginalised groups of young people. The immediate output is not a finished intervention but the evidence and community engagement needed to make future research genuinely useful and policy-ready.
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Background Children and young people (CYP) seeking asylum and refugees (CYPSAR), including unaccompanied CYPSAR (CYPSAR-U), experience multiple adverse events with life-long implications, prioritised in NHS and national initiatives. Significant gaps exist in our ability to reduce inequities in a way that is meaningfully driven by needs and preferences of CYP. Research questions Our transdisciplinary team, comprising clinical, academic, policy, migration, law, and social science expertise, and those with lived experience, will address: • What could routine administrative data tell us about CYPSAR health, education and social care outcomes? • How can we creatively collaborate with CYPSAR to understand and respond to their preferences and needs? • What evidence-based interventions exist to mitigate inequity for CYPSAR? Can they be scaled / adapted for other marginalised CYP? • How should UK policy align with UN Rights of the Child? • How can we rapidly and sustainably translate findings into practice and policy? Aim To develop an evidence and policy-informed programme grant (PG) to reduce inequity for CYPSAR and other marginalised CYP. Objectives Identify key questions about CYPSAR health, education and social care answerable using routinely collected data Co-develop, through participatory methods, user-informed outcomes and qualitative indicators to inform intervention design and evaluation; improve understanding of policy and practice gaps; and create an engagement/ PPI Board strategy Critically appraise interventions and policy for CYPSAR, identifying gaps and translation barriers, to inform interventions Consolidate findings to develop a competitive, evidence-based, programme of work to address inequity in CYPSAR and other marginalised CYP. Development work plan Patient and public involvement initiatives are core to interrelated workpackages (WP): WP1 – to explore characterisation of CYPSAR populations within existing national linked data; to document longitudinal health, education and social care interventions and outcomes for analyses; to use regional administrative data to explore health outcomes; to inform a quantitative plan for PG to answer key questions about the lives of CYPSAR. WP2 – to use co-designed creative and qualitative methodologies to co-develop a user-informed longlist of outcomes and indicators to evaluate interventions, and identify practice and policy gaps; to co-develop a CYPSAR engagement and PPI Board strategy. WP3 – to synthesise current evidence on CYPSAR-related interventions and assess applicability to other marginalised CYP; to explore alignment of UK law and policy with UN Convention on Rights of the Child (UNCRC); to identify gaps to direct next-stage interventions and policy optimisation and their evaluation. WP4 – to explore generalisability, and synthesise findings; to undertake preliminary work to support development of a future intervention, evaluation and national engagement strategy (including Advisory Board) to support practice and policy change. We will also deliver the PG application, to address inequity in CYPSAR and other marginalised populations. We will leverage existing resources for this work. Timelines for delivery: 16 months. Impact: to work with CYPSAR to co-create a proposed programme of work to address inequity in CYPSAR and other marginalised populations. Dissemination to stakeholders, especially CYPSAR, will be by webpages, podcasts, multilingual printed materials, community engagement events, conferences, scientific publications, policy, evidence recommendations.
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