Creating the Life Course Dataset through partnership

The Life Course Data Initiative (LCDI) pilot is a four-year initiative delivered by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) in partnership with the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Government, and Adelaide University’s BetterStart Group with South Australian (SA) Government. The pilot is part of the Australian Government’s Targeting Entrenched Disadvantage package and aims to build a stronger evidence base on disadvantage, particularly intergenerational disadvantage. The goal is to improve child and family wellbeing, informed by better access to relevant Commonwealth and jurisdictional data. 

The pilot was established to address a longstanding challenge of bringing together valuable but fragmented data from different jurisdictions and administrative systems to better understand how people’s circumstances and experiences shape outcomes. The LCDI overcomes these barriers by developing a cross-jurisdictional de-identified linked dataset capable of generating new insights into disadvantage and wellbeing. For the first time at this scale, the Life Course Dataset supports policy development, local decision-making, and better targeting of government investment to improve long-term outcomes.

Further to the creation of the Life Course Dataset, the broader LCDI delivers workstreams spanning governance, research and analysis, and local community engagement. The LCDI has generated several insights and valuable tools including the Service Accessibility Explorer, an interactive mapping application that helps users understand access to education and health services, supporting planning and service delivery.

The establishment of the LCDI has involved close collaboration between partners. To support shared oversight and decision-making, the ABS, ACT and SA partners established the Jurisdictional Partnership Advisory Committee, which plays an important part in setting strategic direction and supporting knowledge sharing. Working together with trust, transparency and flexibility, partners have addressed data sharing challenges and created an evidence base that supports new research into the factors that shape outcomes across the life course.  

Partnerships between governments and the research sector have enabled a range of research projects using the Life Course Dataset.

The Australian National University (ANU) with the ACT Government is leading a research project that explores the factors that characterise multiple and entrenched disadvantage in children in the ACT from birth to adolescence. This project aims to identify predictors of exit from (or persistence in) entrenched disadvantage, to inform policy responses that help break the cycle of disadvantage.

For more information about the research project, refer to Characteristics and trajectories of disadvantaged youth.

The SA research project examines transitions across the life course, from early childhood through the education system and into post-school pathways, including employment, further education, training, and welfare. It investigates how these vary according to socio-economic circumstances and health disadvantage. By analysing these transitions, the project aims to generate evidence to inform policies that support education and employment outcomes, particularly for people experiencing disadvantage.

For more information about the research project, refer to Early school leavers and their later life education, employment and training experiences.

Researchers from the Life Course Centre are leading a project that draws on Commonwealth data to understand how family structure dynamics, such as partnership formation, dissolution and re-partnering, shape parents’ educational and employment trajectories and children’s early developmental outcomes. Their research aims to provide robust evidence to guide policy and program development for single parents and their children.

A major achievement of the LCDI, the Life Course Dataset, enables approved research projects to explore the various ways in which disadvantage affects wellbeing. The dataset safely leverages the existing Person Level Integrated Data Asset (PLIDA), a secure national longitudinal data asset that combines information from multiple national datasets to provide a comprehensive picture of the Australian population over time. Drawing on the respective expertise and resources of all partners, the dataset enables selected ACT and SA jurisdictional data (such as health and education), state and territory birth registration data, Commonwealth childcare data, and homelessness information from the 2021 Census to be linked to and analysed alongside other national information on income, taxation, employment, welfare, migration and population demographics. 

Using data from the Centre for Australian Research into Access, new location-based indicators have also been developed as part of the LCDI. These indicators measure road distance and drive-time to selected services across Australia, including childcare, schools, hospitals, and general practices in 2021. For an analytical article using the data, refer to Children's distance to services​, 2021.

The image below shows a range of insights available from the Life Course Dataset to better understand early life, education, environment and outcomes across the life course. Some data are available at the person level, while others are available at the location level. Together, these data can help researchers explore how individual, family, household and community circumstances interact over time. 

The examples shown are a selection only and do not represent the full range of information available in the Life Course Dataset.
 

The Life Course Dataset allows approved research projects to:

• explore how individual, family, household and community circumstances are interconnected and can have cumulative impacts across a person's life course
• understand how children and families are in contact with different Commonwealth and state and territory service systems
• identify complex interacting drivers of disadvantage over the life course that cannot be observed using a single dataset
• evaluate whether policy interventions improve outcomes.

ACT education data includes information on education participation and outcomes of children enrolled in ACT schools. ACT health data includes records for kindergarten and year 7 school students who participated in a health check, perinatal data for all births in ACT hospitals and home births, and ACT emergency department data.

As part of developing the Life Course Dataset, more than 137,000 ACT education records and 680,000 ACT health records were linked to PLIDA. 

The SA Better Evidence Better Outcomes Linked Data (BEBOLD) platform was linked to PLIDA as part of a separate project being led by the BetterStart Group. More than 1.3 million records were linked through this process. Components of this platform that contain perinatal, hospitalisation, emergency department, education, mental health, homelessness and public housing data have been made available for LCDI related research as part of the LCDI pilot. 

All BEBOLD datasets have been provided by SA Government and non-government agencies under various agreements with BetterStart Group, following approval from multiple research ethics committees. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leadership and governance continue to support operationalising Indigenous Data Sovereignty in the use of the BEBOLD platform.

The combined Commonwealth data, along with ACT and SA jurisdictional data, can help generate a useful evidence base for researchers and policy makers to address disadvantage and to inform policies and services that improve outcomes for children and families.

The Life Course Dataset is governed by the same ABS Privacy and Security protections that govern PLIDA, in addition to jurisdictional governance arrangements. Access to the dataset is limited to projects approved by the LCDI Jurisdictional Partnership Advisory Committee and relevant PLIDA and jurisdictional data custodians. Access is restricted to authorised users who have met strict accreditation, training and confidentiality requirements. 

While LCDI facilitated the linkage of birth registration and childcare data, approved PLIDA projects may request access to these datasets. 

The ABS applies the internationally recognised Five Safes Framework to ensure data are used responsibly and securely. This framework assesses and manages risk across five dimensions: safe people, safe projects, safe settings, safe data and safe outputs. Together with legislative protections, governance arrangements and data custodian approvals, these safeguards help protect privacy and confidentiality while enabling valuable research.

No individual identities are visible to researchers, and all research outputs are subject to disclosure controls before release to protect confidentiality.

In addition to delivering new data and methodological developments for the Life Course Dataset, the initiative has generated capabilities that are now supporting a broad range of research across PLIDA. These enhancements were developed to address common challenges faced by researchers in understanding family context, place-based influences and life course dynamics, reducing the need for individual projects to recreate complex linkages and improving consistency across research. 

A key achievement has been the development of the PLIDA Core Relationships and Core Locations modules as part of the PLIDA Core Modules within the PLIDA Modular Products suite. These reusable modules enable researchers to analyse parent-child and partner relationships, as well as geocoded location information, supporting more sophisticated analysis of how family circumstances and local environments shape outcomes over time. The initiative has developed methods and produced outputs that show how the new Core Scoping Module can be used by researchers to study the experiences and outcomes of people, including birth cohorts, over time.

The uptake of these enhancements demonstrates their value to the broader research community. As at 30 June 2026, the Core Locations module was available to 171 approved projects, while the Core Relationships module was being used by 77 projects. A further 54 projects using the Core Scoping module were benefitting from easier access to population scoping methodology through new scoping flags developed through the initiative. In addition, datasets delivered through the initiative, including national birth registrations and childcare data, were supporting a further 23 and 15 projects respectively. Collectively, these enhancements have strengthened the analytical capability of PLIDA, enabling a growing number of researchers to generate evidence that informs policy development, program design, and service delivery across Australia.

Although the LCDI pilot is still in progress, the Life Course Dataset is already demonstrating the value of bringing together previously disconnected data. The dataset provides a powerful evidence base to inform prevention and early intervention strategies, that will support better outcomes for children, families, and communities. Evaluation is being undertaken alongside the delivery of the pilot to identify lessons learned and to inform a range of potential future directions for the initiative. Some of these future directions could include:

Additional jurisdictional coverage would further strengthen the value of the dataset. As many services that affect people's lives are delivered by state and territory governments, the inclusion of ACT and SA data enables approved research projects to analyse outcomes that are not possible using Commonwealth data alone. Expanding coverage to additional jurisdictions would further enhance the value of the Life Course Dataset for communities, researchers, and policy makers across Australia.

Expanding the range of linked data to include information on programs and services delivered by non-government and community organisations would provide further insights into how policies, services, and interventions influence outcomes. This would help answer critical questions about what works and where support can have the greatest impact.

The future of the Life Course Dataset is not only about expanding the breadth of data available but also about improving community access to data through safe and innovative data products. This would help ensure that evidence is more readily available to support informed local decision-making and improved outcomes for communities.

The development of the Life Course Dataset offers valuable lessons, both for the initiative itself and for other data integration programs. The initiative has demonstrated that building a large cross-jurisdictional dataset is complex and requires significant effort to navigate technical, legal, and governance challenges. It has also shown that these barriers can be overcome through strong partnerships, shared objectives, and a commitment to public benefit.

The development of the dataset has highlighted the importance of building trust and maintaining strong relationships with Commonwealth and jurisdictional data custodians. Understanding and responding to custodians' requirements, priorities, and concerns is critical, as their expertise, support, and confidence underpin the success of any data integration initiative.

The pilot has also shown the importance of establishing a shared vision early in the process, supported by clear governance and open communication. It has highlighted that governance arrangements often take longer to establish than anticipated, but are fundamental to building the transparency, accountability, and trust required to enable data sharing.

The pilot has demonstrated that creating an enduring linked dataset requires significant time, resources, and commitment from all partners. However, this investment results in a valuable resource that can support a wide range of policy, research, and evaluation priorities over time. 

The Life Course Data Initiative has demonstrated the value of bringing together data that was previously held separately across jurisdictions and systems to better understand the drivers of wellbeing and disadvantage. Through collaboration between the ACT Government and Adelaide University’s BetterStart Group with SA Government, and the ABS, the initiative has generated new evidence, strengthened partnerships, and improved the ability to examine outcomes across the life course. 

It will be important to build on this strong foundation through continued collaboration and investment, ensuring the initiative can further expand the evidence base needed to support better policy, service delivery, and wellbeing outcomes.