National and local organisations produce a wealth of valuable data, which can be used to understand how we can reduce the number of children at risk of poor social, health and educational outcomes. However, at present, this administrative data is not being used by enough researchers or analysts. In addition, researchers and analysts are not consistently addressing the questions that policy makers, practitioners or families themselves consider to be the most important. Funded by Administrative Data Research (ADR) England, we will establish a national community catalyst that will provide a vital point of connection, information and coaching for a broad and diverse community of child and family focused researchers and analysts, using (or aspiring to use) administrative data. The community catalyst will focus on children involved with early intervention and children's social care services. We will deliver a 2-year programme of online and face-to-face networking events and information, together with focused coaching workshops. The actions of the catalyst will build a community of researchers who are better connected and better informed. In addition, we will foster tighter connections between researchers and the end users of their work, to ensure close alignment between research and stakeholder priorities. The community catalyst will achieve these over-arching objectives, through four inter-linked work packages (WPs). WP1 will provide national strategic leadership, by delivering a far clearer and up-to-date understanding of the scope of current research using administrative data for child-focused research, together with a firm indication of priorities for new research. An open access research report will integrate learning across the WP, making recommendations about how any barriers to the delivery of new priority knowledge, can be tackled. WP2 will build capacity in the use of administrative and other large-scale datasets by establishing a web-based "one-stop shop" for child-focused researchers, complemented by an effective communication strategy and online information giving events. WP2 aims to raise awareness of the value and availability of administrative data resources, attract new entrants to the community of researchers, and forge greater connections between those already using these data. WP3 aims to strengthen and expand a diverse administrative data research community, through online and face-to-face networking events, focused on the ADR UK flagship datasets and use-cases. Focused coaching workshops will target and support new-comers to administrative data research, and provide opportunities for new collaborations among more experienced researchers. WP4 will provide a bespoke opportunity for an embedded research fellow, to access and use the valuable EChild resource, with supervision from the core team. To deliver on this ambitious project, we have brought together a highly experienced interdisciplinary project team - across five academic institutions in the UK; all members of the core team have pioneered the use of child and family administrative data, across sectors. The core team will be supported by a wider expert reference group, who will share their experience and use-cases, against each of the ADR England flagship datasets and related data resources.

The Old Poor Law in England and Wales, administered by the local parish, dispensed benefits to paupers providing a uniquely comprehensive, pre-modern system of relief. In the process, it also offered entrepreneurial or employment opportunities to the people who supplied and administered the system. This project will investigate the experiences of people across the social spectrum whose lives were touched by the Old Poor Law. Very little is known about the midwives, tailors, workhouse mistresses, butchers and others who serviced the parish, and this research sets out to redress this omission by drawing on a class of little-used sources and on the collective support of volunteer researchers. Overseers' vouchers are the ephemeral, handwritten papers typically generated whenever the parish incurred a debt. These vouchers survive in very large numbers for selected parishes, such as the 2063 for Colwich in Staffordshire. They provide information about the identities of those who were paid for goods and services for the poor, and also reveal the scale of income to be gained by working on behalf of the parish. Additionally, these vouchers expose the networks of traders who benefitted from the business - and those who did not - and the longevity of these relationships. The social and economic bonds forged between the poor and the non-poor are fully reflected at the most granular scale in these quotidian sources. The presence of vouchers in parish collections has long been acknowledged, but their utility for historical research has been wholly disregarded owing to the significant technical challenges of using them. Where they survive vouchers can be tightly or chaotically folded, diverse in format, and of variable legibility, offering uncertain returns for the lone investigator. As a pilot study in Staffordshire has demonstrated, however, volunteer researchers working alongside academics have the scope to unpack vouchers both physically and intellectually. Collaboration with volunteers offers historians of the Old Poor Law a new opportunity to integrate the content of vouchers into histories of the poor and to evidence more fully the lives of ordinary people beyond poverty. This work will generate partial biographies of tradespeople, administrators, paupers, and workers who are not represented elsewhere in the historical record in consistent ways. The biographies will be written by volunteers and project staff. These outputs will not always mimic the complete record required for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, since the nature of the sources will not permit cradle-to-grave certainty about people's life courses. What they will do is draw on vouchers and available genealogical material for the same locations to outline those parts of lives that are reliably visible from these recalcitrant parish sources. The value of partial biographies has been demonstrated by the limited number available via the ESRC-funded London Lives website. This work will expand the geographical remit of the model, develop the methodology by placing vouchers at the heart of the exercise, and incorporate the editorial choices and writing of volunteer researchers. At completion of the funded project the collected dictionaries will contain a minimum of 1000 lives from across the counties of Cumbria, Staffordshire and East Sussex; and the project dataset will include at least 50,000 lines of data, reflecting a similar number of vouchers.

The UK transport sector lags behind all other sectors in its achievement of energy diversification and carbon emission reductions to date, with emissions from transport essentially unchanged since the benchmark year of 1990. The Committee on Climate Change have been very critical of this failure and identified electrically-assisted scooters and bikes as part of solutions that need to be urgently accelerated. Indeed, the UK lags behind other countries in the uptake of a range of innovative light vehicles for both passenger and freight applications. Examples include electrically-assisted: bicycles, cargo bicycles, push scooters, skateboards, trikes, quadricycles, hoverboards etc. These involve some electrical assistance, as well as some energy expenditure by the user. Hence, we class these vehicles as light electric vehicles for active travel (LEVATs). They enable people to cycle, scoot, skate or otherwise travel more easily or enjoyably than conventional walking or cycling. Their power source provides the opportunity to link to a variety of digital technologies - from unlocking shared vehicles, to 'track-and-trace' systems for delivery companies, to map systems or health feedback tools for users - what ELEVAVTE refers to as 'digital' travel. Innovation at the interface of e-mobility and digital technologies plays a key role for the uptake of these novel modes, with energy, IT and transport industries as key players. Increased uptake of these vehicles has significant potential for reducing mobility-related energy demand and carbon emissions, especially when users switch from non-active modes such as cars or vans. The aim of this project is to better understand these opportunities - the technological and business options and specifications, where and who they might appeal to, what trips they could be used for, how far they could replace conventional motor vehicle trips - and some of the challenges that accompany them - such as overall energy usage, safety and regulatory issues, digital integration, physical environment design, battery standardisation and behavioural inertia. After developing typologies and technology assessments based on multiple criteria, the empirical end user research will consist of surveys (aiming for 1,200 responses), demonstration days (aiming to engage at least 300 people) and longer trials with at least 60 private individuals in 3 cities in England throughout 2020 and 2021. Quantitative surveys and in-depth interviews will be undertaken with participants before and after usage to understand changes in user perceptions and experience, triangulated with GPS tracking of the trial vehicles and contextual data (e.g. weather, hilliness). As part of the work, we will develop new safety training resources for each mode, drawing on, and adapting, existing UK initiatives and international experience and working towards certified schemes. Freight applications in the logistics industry will be analysed through expert interviews and case studies. A number of technology and demand scenarios will assess the whole lifecycle health and environmental impacts. This will include work with the World Health Organization expert group to extend the HEAT tool (which enables users without expertise in impact assessment to conduct economic assessments of the health impacts of walking or cycling) to include these types of vehicle. This project is supported by a range of partners - including the three local authorities, Sustrans and the World Health Organization - and will be guided by an advisory panel. We will also engage with a range of industry stakeholders, through the Transport Systems Catapult, Clean Growth UK and other means. We also envisage international engagement in the work, given the rapidly evolving and growing nature of the topic, and the lack of a substantial academic literature on the implications of these innovative light vehicles for energy demand, mobility and climate change.

We are a team of people from all walk of life with a shared vision of improving wellbeing for our community on the Fylde coast and for other coastal communities. Coastal communities continue to have more and greater mental and physical health challenges, resulting in lower life expectancy and higher rates of many major diseases compared to their inland neighbours (Chief Medical Officer's Annual Report, 2021). There are a number of well-known factors that contribute to health inequalities in coastal regions, including deprivation, poor housing, and a low-wage economy (Marmot, 2005; Williams & Buck, 2020). All of these place increased demand on overstretched health services. Despite this, large-scale research focusing specifically on coastal communities is scarce. It is known that community-based support delivered by the VCFSE sector has the potential to reduce the burden on public health services, which has been especially important during the Covid-19 pandemic (Stansfield et al., 2020). VCFSE organisations are close to communities, they have skills in and experience of working with the most disadvantaged members of the community often considered 'hard to reach', they have the flexibility to respond to community needs and deliver effective interventions (Department of Health, 2008; Local Government Association, 2017; Allison, 2010). However, there are barriers in the commissioning process, e.g. lack of financial resources, and challenges in the evaluation strategies, e.g. limited evaluation literacy, technical capability, and knowledge of relevant outcome indicators, which makes it difficult for these organisations to be recognised and for their important work to become sustainable (Bach-Mortensen & Montgomery, 2018). We will mobilise our community's assets by uniting members of the public, community-based practitioners, and commissioners on the Fylde Coast to work together and improve partnership, service provision, and research. To do this, we first need to understand what is currently being delivered in the area; and so we will map out and engage the fullest possible range of community-based support providers. We will establish and test a model of working together. This model will include three co-production groups; each will focus on a specific task and work towards equally important aims. These groups will be led by co-researchers with relevant expertise by discipline or experience. Group 1 will unite lived-experience experts and practitioners, will use creative methods (e.g., PhotoVoice) to imagine the future of a community-hub that can integrate a broader range of available community-based support in response to the needs of the community. The aim is to enable lived-experience experts to become 'shapers and makers' of their own care provision rather than 'users and choosers' of it (Cornwall & Gaventa, 2000). Group 2 will provide a dedicated space for the public and VCFSE sector support providers to discuss the key barriers to cross-sector partnership working, co-produce an action plan to overcome these barriers, and establish shared goals, vision, and language. Group 3 will be called the Research Consortium, and will unite key stakeholders, including lived-experience experts. They will conduct a consultative rapid review on main drivers of ill-health in coastal communities, learn from Group 1 and 2, co-produce a five-year research plan, and establish an integrated research infrastructure (i.e. data sharing agreements, data warehouse, core outcome measures) enabling them to conduct research that will benefit people on the Fylde Coast and beyond. In parallel, regular open research workshops will be held to build research capacity in the community. We will test the impact of our activities on network patterns using social network analysis. We will connect with other coastal communities, including Hastings, with similar characteristics and health outcomes to share learning and lay the foundations of future collaborations.