Harnessing administrative data to enhance lives: RDS colleagues reflect on the ADR UK Conference 2025

With a focus on this year’s theme of ‘From records to research: Harnessing administrative data to enhance lives’, the conference brought together researchers and data professionals from across the UK and beyond to celebrate how administrative data is being used for public good, as well as where exploring what the next innovations in the sector will look like.

We spoke to some RDS colleagues about their experience of the conference and how the themes resonate with our work to simplify the process for researchers using public sector data. 

What was your main ambition for this year’s ADR UK Conference? 

Rosie Seaman, Data Sourcing Manager: A boost for big picture ambitions!

Linus Chirchir, Data Analyst: I wanted to learn from others working on similar challenges in data quality, linkage, and synthetic data, while also sharing our work on reproducible synthetic data pipelines. 

James Shiels, Project Manager: I was aiming to get a better understanding of the wider context around ADR UK, how the organisations involved work together, and learn from how others are operating in this space. 

What was your main takeaway from the event and how does this relate to your role at RDS?

Siân Robson, Senior Data Analyst: It really struck me just how similar some of the work happening in different organisations across the UK is. At RDS, we’re in a good position to help bring work together across different organisations and to enable collaboration across the four nations.  

Jen Muir, Senior Data Analyst: During a session on career trajectories and the different skills required, Eve Moore (Data Scientist at ONS) said "real problems make great teachers.” This resonated with me and my learning style. It can often feel like a really complex working environment, and a significant amount of learning is done 'on-the-job'. This quote felt like a nice positive statement that captured this type of learning. 

Sophie McCall, Senior Data Analyst: RDS is definitely on the right track with synthetic data – other organisations shared with us their journeys with generating synthetic data from metadata, with ONS talking about how they are developing a shiny app around their code to improve user experience. Other organisations expressed interest in working with us to generate and host synthetic data, and National Records of Scotland demonstrated their confidence in our hosting service by offering us synthetic Census 2022 when it is ready.  

Natalie Terry, Senior Communications Officer: This conference really highlighted to me just how far RDS has come since the last ADR UK Conference in 2023. My role at the conference has changed from explaining RDS are and our place in the Scottish data system, to being met with recognition and enthusiasm. It was a huge boost to have so many of our analysts with us at the conference, as lots of people wanted to talk about a whole host of specific projects that we work across. 

Was there a particular speaker or part of the event that stood out to you? 

Siân Robson:  A standout moment from the event for me was Cabinet Secretary Mark Drakeford's response to Rosie Seaman's question about how organisations can obtain trust from government to make change and to innovate. His response was that governments like to take input from organisations with a proven track record, that they prefer to start by making small changes and to see that a change, once proven, can be scaled to have a big impact. 

Linus Chirchir: A pre-conference workshop on Data Quality, led by Prof. Peter Christen, was a highlight for me. It challenged us to look beyond the surface of administrative data, reminding us that population databases aren’t always complete, data processing isn’t error-free, and synthetic data has limits. It was a thought-provoking session that sharpened how I think about my own work. 

Eleanor Mitchell, Data Sourcing Manager: I thought that Alice Pearsons from Edinburgh Napier University did a fantastic job of presenting on what research she hopes to do with Scottish LEO data, and answered all of the questions addressed to her, despite the fact that she doesn’t yet have access to the data.  

I also found the talk from Sharon Heys, Head of Legal Population Data Science at Swansea University, really interesting. Sharon presented on the Information Governance analysis that she has done on the responsible use of AI models in sensitive health data research. 

Rosie Seaman: Mark Drakeford for the personal anecdotes on data, the call to action to be bold, and the confirmation that we are living through an opportunity for real change. Tom Emery for taking us on a journey and putting data in the context of history and ending with the inspirational strategies and operational opportunities that I really think RDS could learn from and maybe one day replicate. 

Research Data Scotland are a delivery partner on the ADR Scotland programme. You can also read more about ADR UK on their website.