Research helps shape Care Review findings on improving outcomes

Alongside colleagues at What Works for Children’s Social Care (WWCSC), I first started working with the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care research team in March 2021, just as the review launched. We quickly learnt that the scale and scope of the review was vast, but that the time to complete it was short.

Our task was to generate evidence and provide independent research support to the team. Our vision was for a review that would draw on the best research evidence available and use it alongside all the other information and insights it gathered to drive thinking, challenge partners, generate new ideas and ultimately to make recommendations that would improve the lives of children and families.

Our approach

By May 2022, we had produced four new research reports, published four systematic reviews (three of which were commissioned externally) and created several rapid evidence summaries. We also polled social workers on questions the review team were grappling with.

Our research programme was born out of collaborative and searching conversations between the review team and the WWCSC research team.

The scale of the review’s task meant that finding a starting point for the research was a challenge: there is a vast literature out there, but huge gaps in terms of what interventions, programmes and approaches work to improve the lives of children and families.

We read everything we could get our hands on, spoke to stakeholders and generated lots of different ideas about the types of research questions we could investigate. Not all of these were successful. For example, we had hoped to be able to assess the impact of different multi-agency working arrangements and support packages for kinship carers on outcomes for children and families.

For various reasons, not least our short timeframe, this turned out not to be possible. This is standard fare in research – not all ideas turn into a viable project. Our future work programme will revive these ideas.

In lieu of being able to generate evidence about programmes and practice that do or don’t work, we turned to descriptive research that would give a greater understanding of the lives and experiences of children with a social worker and the services that were offered to them.

We identified what we thought were important and substantive gaps in the evidence base in England that also met the needs of the review team. This research would yield important insights for policy, practice and future research that needed greater attention.

During the year, we worked with the review team, we generated evidence on a broad range of topics, from commissioning secure children’s home placements and sufficiency strategies, to analyses of residential and kinship care journeys, exploratory work on service provision for children with a “child in need” plan and evidence reviews on reunification, decision making and teenagers with a social worker.

Some of these reports are long because they have meticulously reported everything we found in the name of transparency, but they are bursting with insights and information that take us on the journey to building an evidence base for children’s social care. Research insights

Kinship care featured prominently in many of our conversations with the review team. The review was keen to promote the use of kinship care for children who can’t live with their parents. Their interest wasn’t limited to children formally in care, but also children living with a friend or family in the community, whether informally or under a special guardianship order (SGO).

There is no national or comprehensive dataset on children in informal kinship arrangements, so we focused on children in kinship foster care and kinship SGOs.

We reviewed evidence on the impact of kinship care placements on outcomes (which are mixed, with some evidence that it improves stability) and searched for research on how to increase the numbers of kinship placements and how to provide better support (which was virtually non-existent).

This spurred us on to examine existing English administrative data on the care journeys and outcomes of children who at some point during childhood experienced a kinship foster care or SGO placement.

Our analysis found significant regional variation in the rate of both kinship foster care and kinship SGO arrangements, from less than five per cent in some regions to approximately 30 per cent in others.

We are currently exploring the factors for this variation using available administrative data and hope to publish these insights shortly.

Looking ahead, we have been awarded funding to build on these findings to understand whether and how better support for kinship carers, including training and financial support packages for kinship SGOs, affects children’s outcomes.

We also want to consider what programmes and approaches safely increase the numbers of kinship placements; this might include the use of family group conferencing or different local authority practice models.

We know from speaking to people in practice that there are many important factors which may explain this variation, including the legal system and how it is applied locally, local authority working culture and practices, and attitudes to risk and decision-making among social workers in different areas.

This work links with other areas we investigated for the review. For example, we commissioned a review on decision-making in social work. It drew on 28 studies to describe the features of good quality decision-making – accuracy, consistency, outcomes, practice and equity – and the factors that affect good decision-making with reference to thresholds and different areas of social work.

It restates that good decision-making is a highly skilled task. We are drawing on this evidence and considering how to use these findings which relate to decisions made by social workers, families and the courts, about formalising kinship arrangements and how this affects the aforementioned regional variation we identified.

Our work on support for kinship carers will also draw on another review of evidence we conducted, which examined the impact of policy level interventions on child maltreatment or involvement with children’s social care. We found that structural level interventions, such as financial and housing support – or the lack of – play a key role in shaping children’s lives. While these results were modest (and limited by the quality of the studies we looked at), they affect hundreds of thousands of children.

Drawing on these findings, our future kinship work will look to identify local and national policy level programmes for supporting kinship carers, and examine their impact on carers and children.

At WWCSC, we are keen to conduct more evaluations of system and policy level interventions, which we believe have an important impact on children’s lives, often alongside individual or family level interventions.

As we wait to see how the government responds to the recommendations of the review, we look forward to generating or contributing to research programmes that evaluate the full breadth of changes introduced to improve the lives of children with a social worker.

Flying the evidence flag

Beyond generating evidence for the review, our role was also to advocate for the use of evidence, and high-quality evidence in particular, in shaping insights and vision for the future of children’s social care.

We believe research plays a key role in practice, and policy development and implementation alongside expertise and insights from practitioners, policy makers, and children and families who experience the system.

We spent time talking to the review team about the existing body of evidence, including where the gaps were and how we might learn from other contexts, including adult social care, but also social work research in other cultural or geographical contexts.

We made the case for always assessing research carefully to understand its strengths and limitations. Research in social work is hard and laden with assumptions and biases, whether we’re evaluating interventions with randomised control trials or interviewing children who have had traumatic experiences. Most research (and certainly ours) necessarily has limitations.

Readers must make a judgment about the implications of those limitations for the findings and how these are interpreted. This is a challenging task that requires research training, so it may not always be realistic to expect policymakers to be able to do this independently. However, it is essential to determine whether research findings are reliable and thus how useful they are.

Whether highlighting limitations of an individual, or groups of studies, deciphering implications of research, discovering important gaps in evidence or generating new insights for the review, we were reminded of the many challenges that come with getting research into policy and practice.

Even though policymakers want research to inform their thinking and researchers want their work to be relevant for policy, our ways of working and priorities can still diverge. This is an ongoing challenge for WWCSC and researchers more widely.

As part of our remit to create and promote evidence-based practice in children’s social care, we were pleased to be able to contribute independent research to the review, and to make the case for using evidence in policy and decision making.

Now, as we await the government’s response to the review, WWCSC will be leading the call for careful evaluation of future changes so we can measure the benefits for our children, young people and families.

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