han deciding the categories in advance. For example, category ‘Child’s details’ includes data items about the child’s name, surname, date of birth, etc.; category ‘Getting to know the child meeting/review’ contains data items about meetings practitioners attend through the care journey, like the type of meeting or the date of the meeting. It is important to remember that the categorisation of data items is not fixed and is open to interpretation. To a lesser extent this is also true of the data-item-to-question matching. When creating the form, it may have appeared to the creator(s) that an item fits in one category better than another and has been placed in that category, but another reader may question and suggest that the data item may best fit in another category. Also, the categories themselves may rightfully be contested and themselves changed. One reason this has been done is to reduce the total number of rows. The other option would have been to repeat data items for each category it was relevant to, but this would have resulted in having a very large data matrix. Figure 2: Data categories Data categories Data Item numbers Child's details 1 to 33 Getting to know the child meeting/reviews 34 to 79 General 80 to 138 Relevant Professionals (inc. SW and IRO) 139 to 194 Child's documents 195 to 227 Child's general aspirations and worries 228 to 244 Money 245 to 302 Accommodation 303 to 325 Education/Employment/Training 326 to 375 Health 376 to 469 Contact/friends/relationships 470 to 553 Placement expectations 554 to 583 63 DfE Project 2A: User research into social worker inputted data to CMS Data categories Data Item numbers Independence 584 to 603 Plans: Care, Pathway, Permanency and Parallel 604 to 744 CLA/Placement Requests and panels 745 to 1000 Routines/Behavio