Course summary

A new interdisciplinary degree with the Edinburgh Futures Institute The MSc programme in Child Protection Data Futures aims to build data skills and connect disciplines for safer futures for all children. The current child protection system is fragmented and disjointed, with multiple data sets, sources, standards and capabilities. This means that it is difficult to join up data, obscuring the scale of complexity and challenges within the child protection system. Without high-quality data that can guide policy, funding and interventions, children continue to be exploited and abused, and perpetrators of abuse have impunity. Child protection data is also changing. With the advent of new technology like extended realities and generative AI comes new online forms of harm. Public services and frontline practitioners are experiencing for the first time enormous volumes of data, particularly around the creation and sharing of Child Sexual Abuse Material. Those who work across the child protection system therefore need to be prepared to not just build better foundations and standards to commission, collect and analyse existing data, but be ready to future-proof the system against harm in new spaces and in new ways. This programme recognises that complex data insights are needed for a complex system, and that every actor and discipline within the system has a role to play. Through this interdisciplinary and challenge-driven programme, students will learn how to conceptualise and actually use child protection data to create change. This programme will increase knowledge and understanding of:

• risk and protective factors

• the prevalence and incidence of child abuse

• the theories and promising programmes and policies that exist to prevent and respond to child abuse

• core data skills

• data ethics

• the ability to interrogate issues of global scope using perspectives from across disciplines

• creative and analytic approaches to knowledge