[Comment] Linking routine data with school-based trials: unlocking long-term insights

The UK is uniquely positioned to advance the evaluation of child and adolescent public health interventions through routinely collected administrative data. Increasingly robust infrastructures—such as the National Pupil Database and the Education and Child Health Insights from Linked Data—provide longitudinal, population-level information for assessing intervention effectiveness over time.1,2 These developments create new opportunities to revisit and augment existing school-based cluster randomised trials (CRTs), moving beyond short-term outcomes to examine long-term, real-world impacts.