Welcome to the Millennium Cohort Study
The Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) is a multi-disciplinary research project following the lives of around 19,000 children born in the UK in 2000-01. It is the most recent of Britain’s world-renowned national longitudinal birth cohort studies. The study has been tracking the Millennium children through their early childhood years and plans to follow them into adulthood. It collects information on the children’s siblings and parents. MCS’s field of enquiry covers such diverse topics as parenting; childcare; school choice; child behaviour and cognitive development; child and parental health; parents’ employment and education; income and poverty; housing, neighbourhood and residential mobility; and social capital and ethnicity.
The study is core funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and a consortium of Government departments.
The surveys
The four surveys of MCS cohort members carried out so far – at age nine months, three, five and seven years – have built up a uniquely detailed portrait of the children of the new century.
Three sub-studies have also been undertaken, with two reports produced so far: the Health Visitor Survey Report, and the Fertility Survey Report.
The Age 11 Survey is taking place during 2012.
The data
The data for all MCS sweeps is available from the Economic and Social Data Service. For more information, see our accessing the data page.
This section of our website offers tools and information to help researchers use the data. If you need further support, please contact our user support team.
Contact us
If you can’t find the help you need on our surveys and documentation pages, please contact clsfeedback@ioe.ac.uk
If you have queries regarding downloading the data, please contact the UK Data Archive.