ered helpful, practitioners often felt overwhelmed at the volume of information they are expected to collect. The data matrix shows that most data items were identified as 'local' data. This finding shows that much of the data is required by LAs and not specifically for statutory returns. However, much of what is collected feeds the statutory returns. This data has to be analysed in different ways to understand the final data items submitted on the statutory returns. For example, to understand the rate of completion of the initial health assessments requires many dates to be collected, clarified and analysed between the social care systems and health systems. This is largely a manual task. In our interviews with practitioners and data consumers, we found that these numbers do not convey the bigger picture, including the complexity of cases. The research shows that there is some information and data, specifically about education, health, immigration status, and missing episodes, which is recorded either by other teams within the same service, or by other government departments such as health, education, or the police, and might be missing from the child/young person’s records. This is because it hasn’t been shared or it has been uploaded to the CMS as an ‘attachment’ on the child/young person’s file, either in Word or PDF documents. Information in documents saved in these formats is not easily findable, and the information contained within the documents cannot be searched. Consequently, practitioners spend a lot of time searching to find the information they need. Practitioners and data consumers spoke about the need for a summary sheet or chronology to act as a cover sheet, providing an overview of key information contained in the form or overall file. In addition, a si