Service updates
Monthly maintenance
Please be advised that the SRS will be unavailable for use during the following dates and times for monthly maintenance.
Thursday 27 April between 16:00 and 18:00
Saturday 29 April between 07:00 and 11:00
Please ensure that you have logged out and disconnected any sessions from the SRS before the start times above.
Limited service support over the bank holidays
Please be advised that SRS service teams will be unavailable on the following days.
- Monday 1 May
- Monday 8 May
- Monday 29 May
- Tuesday 30 May
On these days the SRS environment will continue to operate but SRS teams will not be available for support. Service-level agreements (SLAs) will pause on these dates, resuming the next working day.
Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.
Introducing the data refresh ‘arrivals board’
Users have fed back to the SRS that they would like to be made aware in advance about when datasets within the SRS are due to be refreshed.
Until now, our users have only been advised about data refreshes and new dataset ingests after they have happened. Our new data refresh ‘arrivals board’ looks to provide a monthly update on when data is being refreshed, alongside an expected date for any delayed deliveries.
We will endeavour to provide timely updates for all data refreshes, and give as much information as we can about any delayed items.
If you have any feedback about this new feature, please contact SRS Customer Support.
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Case study of the month
Evaluation of centre assessment grades and grading gaps in summer 2020
A research project by Ofqual, the Department for Education, Ofsted, and UCAS used secure data to showcase the potential of the new Grading and Admissions Data for England (GRADE) dataset. The project evaluated the use of centre assessment grades to inform policy decisions around the future grading of GCSEs and A-Levels.
To read the case study in full please visit the Administrative Data Research (ADR) UK website.
You can also listen to the authors presenting this research at 11:00 today, Thursday 20 April, during their Research Excellence Series Talk.
Dataset of the month
The Annual Population Survey
The Annual Population Survey (APS) is a combined survey of households in the UK. It uses data combined from two waves of the main Labour Force Survey (LFS) with data collected on a local sample boost. The datasets consist of 12 months of survey data and are broken down on a quarterly basis. Due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic the achieved sample size is approximately 200,000 respondents. The topics covered in the survey include employment, unemployment, housing, ethnicity, religion, health, and education.
The purpose of APS is to provide information on key social and socio-economic variables between the 10-yearly censuses, with particular emphasis on providing information relating to local authority areas. The published statistics enable monitoring of estimates between censuses for a range of policy purposes and provide local area information for labour market estimates.
The LFS and APS are recommended sources for employment-related statistics, such as estimates of the number of people in employment or unemployed. They are also a unique source of comprehensive, coherent information about economic inactivity, as it separates information about people who want a job and those who do not.
If you want to access the APS dataset within the ONS SRS, please contact the SRS Customer Support team.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI): Office for National Statistics, released 23 February 2023, ONS SRS Metadata Catalogue, dataset, Annual Population Survey - UK, 10.57906/0qp1-6k77
ADR UK conference - submission deadline extended |
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We have extended the deadline for submitting your abstracts and pre-conference workshop applications to be part of this year’s ADR UK Conference 2023.
The abstract deadline has been extended to Sunday 23 April.
Please get in touch with the conference team at ADRUK.2023@ons.gov.uk if you have any questions.
Introducing the Integrated Data Service
If you would like to learn more about the Integrated Data Service (IDS), we are hosting 'The future of data access: A showcase of the Integrated Data Service', a virtual event, on Tuesday 25 April at 14:00. We hope you can join us.
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Housekeeping
In preparation for transition to the Integrated Data Service, researchers should ensure that their project areas are subject to regular housekeeping, and all files that allow for replication of research (such as code files) are cleared and exported from the environment at the end of the project. If you have an active project you are no longer working on, please discuss with your project lead, and request that they contact srs.customer.support@ons.gov.uk with the project number to request to close the project. Please also advise the Customer Support team if your project lead has changed.
Events
Upcoming roadshow workshops: Introduction to the UK’s linked administrative data resources
ADR UK, in partnership with the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA), is piloting a series of free workshops to raise awareness of the wealth of linked administrative datasets available for public-good research across the UK.
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Thursday 20 April, 10:00-11:30
Midlands Graduate School Doctoral Training Partnership
This event will include a case study from ADR UK Fellow Dr Tim McSweeney on serious and organised crime using the Ministry of Justice Data First datasets and linkages.
Monday 24 April, 10:00-11:30
White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership
This event will include a case study using the Longitudinal Education Outcomes linked dataset from Oliver Anderson (Department for Education) titled “Post 16 education and labour market activities, outcomes and pathways”.
ONS Research Excellence Series 2023
Thursday 20 April, 11:00-12:00
Tim Stratton and Nadir Zanini from Ofqual and Philip Noden from Ofsted will be providing a virtual presentation on 'Making the GRADE: Data sharing and evaluation of assessment results following summer 2020'.
Thursday 18 May, 11:00-12:00
Jack Worth and Dawson McLean from the National Foundation for Educational Research will be providing a virtual presentation on 'Racial equality in the teacher workforce'.
Both pieces of research received commendations for collaboration at the 2022 ONS Research Excellence Awards.
Please look out for future talks in the Research Excellence Series 2023.
New funding for the Department for Education will drive up use of linked education data for policy-relevant research
ADR UK will provide over £1 million funding to the Department for Education (DfE) to support streamlining access for accredited researchers to the department’s administrative data. This will realise greater value for analysis and research.
Following the successful launch of access to research-ready Longitudinal Education Outcomes data in July 2021, the DfE is committed to making more research-ready data assets available in the ONS Secure Research Service. So, ADR UK is funding a new DfE Data Access and Engagement Programme.
Making nursing data available to inform policy
The Scottish Centre for Administrative Data Research (SCADR) have been working with the Nursing and Midwifery Council and the ONS, to enable nursing and midwifery registrant data to be made available for research for the first time via the SRS.
For more information on this, please see the article on SCADR's website.
Have you listened to the latest podcast episode?
Disability: When the numbers alone are simply not enough.
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In the latest episode of Statistically Speaking, we focus on a powerful example of when the numbers alone are simply not enough. The most recent Census has told us how many people have some form of disability but to really understand the nature of those disabilities and the needs of people reporting them we need to do a lot more work.
Regular maintenance to the SRS – Researcher update
Following some recent enquiries, this is an update on the weekly and monthly timetable of scheduled maintenance, which is carried out to keep the SRS running smoothly for researchers.
To allow your code to run effectively and without interruption, please avoid running your analysis during these times.
Weekly maintenance
All servers are rebooted between 07:00 and 07:30 every Monday morning and the SRS will not be accessible during these times
Monthly maintenance
Updates are applied on the final Saturday of every month between 07:00 and 11:00. The SRS will not be accessible for the duration of this maintenance.
Dates for monthly maintenance 2023
- Saturday 29 April
- Saturday 27 May
- Saturday 24 June
- Saturday 29 July
- Saturday 26 August
- Saturday 30 September
- Saturday 28 October
- Saturday 25 November
- Saturday 30 December
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