The UCL Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities (CEPEO) are pleased to offer this in-person training opportunity in partnership with Administrative Data Research (ADR) UK.

Delivered by expert users of the data, this in-person computer workshop will provide new users with practical insight into the content of the National Pupil Database (NPD) and how it can be used to address interesting and policy-relevant research questions.

Practicalities

This course will be run using R. Attendees will need to have at least basic skills in R – e.g. the ability to read in data, make links between data tables and undertake basic descriptive and regression analysis – in order to get the most out of the session.

An identical session using Stata instead of R will take place on 14th July 2025. Please make sure you sign up for the correct course given your software preference.

Users should bring their own laptop with R pre-installed wherever possible.

As places are very limited, please only sign up if you are confident that you will be able to attend. We have limited funding available to help cover travel costs for PhD students without recourse to other funds. Please contact us via Eventbrite if you would like to enquire about this possibility.

Overview of content

This workshop will provide a simplified simulation of the experience of addressing a policy-relevant research question using a synthetic version of the NPD. It will cover how the data can be used to address this question and discuss some of the decisions that researchers will need to make along the way. It will provide an overview of data tables in the NPD, with more detailed exploration of the Key Stage 4 attainment data, the pupil-level school census, measures of attainment from primary school, and attendance data. By the end of the workshop, users will have created a bespoke ‘research-ready’ dataset and used this to undertake some basic descriptive and regression analysis.

Users will be able to keep copies of the code they create during the workshop but will NOT be able to retain the synthetic data (although we anticipate the synthetic data being made available for wider use in future).

A more detailed itinerary is available to registered participants.

CEPEO-ADRUK Practical Introduction to the National Pupil Database using R