ng initiatives in the sector, including relationships to other DDSF projects, possible initiatives to benefit LA data work, and benefits to DfE objectives (section 7). This report concludes a year of intensive and productive work to introduce a first live implementation of the SSD. Later sections of this report detail our approach to assessing how well we met our original objectives, and what work would be most useful to pursue next (section 8), key learnings from the project for colleagues involved in other cross-sector data work (section 9), and acknowledgements of the many partners without whose unique contributions the work could not have arrived at its current stage (section 11). We hope colleagues will find the SSD useful, and this report valuable as a record of the work. 6 4. The brief The DfE provided a clear brief for this project which we repeat in full below, with our emphasis: LA data teams must balance their limited capacity with high demand for data work. One way they address this is by sharing data tools, tasks and methods across professional regional and national networks. However, such economies of scale can only be achieved where datasets are standard across LAs. This limits data collaboration between LAs to standard ‘core’ datasets – most notably the Children in Need (CIN) Census and SSDA903, for children in need and looked after children respectively – and Ofsted’s “Annex A” specification of child-level data to be provided during an inspection. These datasets lack much of the depth and granularity that individual LAs will look to incorporate in bespoke local analysis, including to understand quality of practice. This leads to a second issue: while it is inevitable that LAs differ in the quality of their data work to some extent, the lack of data visi