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Improving the Effectiveness of Virtual Schools

On average, looked-after children do less well at school than their peers with marked differences in educational outcomes between local authority areas. Virtual schools are local authority teams that support the learning of children in care. This study by the University of Exeter, University of Oxford and the National Association of Virtual School Heads (NAVSH) set out to explore the effectiveness of virtual schools and how this could be improved.

Outcomes for Looked-after Children Attending Boarding Schools

    Research
  • Wednesday, August 30, 2023
  • | CYP Now
Researchers from the University of Nottingham were commissioned by the Royal National Children's Springboard Foundation (RNCSF) to evaluate its boarding school programme for children in care or on the edge of care and help understand the potential educational and economic benefits.

Creative Life Story Work strengthens care relationships

    Research
  • Tuesday, January 31, 2023
  • | CYP Now
Evaluation of a creative, relational approach to life story work has shown it to be higher quality and more collaborative than traditional life story work, and that it helps to develop and strengthen relationships between care-experienced children and young people and their carers.

Children's Online User Ages Quantitative Research Study

    Research
  • Tuesday, January 3, 2023
  • | CYP Now
Children and young people can get around age restrictions on social media apps and websites, increasing the risk of them coming to harm online. To understand the extent to which children are bypassing age checks, UK communications regulator Ofcom commissioned research to get an idea of how many children have online profiles that make them appear older than they actually are.

Commissioning Care – Research evidence: Sufficiency report

This report provides analysis of all up-to-date local authority sufficiency strategies with a focus on identifying the main perceived challenges for councils to meet their sufficiency duty, what actions are being undertaken or planned to improve commissioning outcomes, and perceived negative consequences associated with using certain commissioning or market shaping approaches.

Matching in foster care and how we can improve it

    Research
  • Tuesday, February 1, 2022
  • | CYP Now
The process of “matching” children and young people in care to their foster carers is a pivotal moment in the care journey; a good “match” decision, process of sharing information, and process of moving into the household can help a child feel safe, loved, and happy. In the UK, the majority of children in care live in fostering households and are affected by matching.

Child sexual exploitation: research evidence

    Research
  • Tuesday, August 31, 2021
  • | CYP Now
Kairika Karsna, senior research and evaluation officer at the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse, on why we need to ensure that we are capturing and understanding all forms of sexual abuse.

Profit Making and Risk in Independent Children’s Social Care Placement Providers

Local authorities in England spend more than £2bn a year buying fostering and children's homes services alone from private and voluntary sector organisations (collectively referred to as the independent sector). Local authorities themselves continue to provide most foster placements, but around two in every five foster placements are made with independent sector providers. In children's homes the reverse is true. Here, three in every four placements are made in the independent sector.

Children's Homes Research

The concerns of London local authorities in meeting sufficiency duties described in the first study and the severity of this in relation to residential children's homes, are recognised as a theme across the country. This study was commissioned by the LGA to look at the policies, barriers, and facilitators for local authorities and smaller independent providers in establishing children's homes.

Review of Sufficiency Strategies in London

Demand for children's services has been increasing nationally in recent years. Changing demographics and evolving complexity of needs are also exerting cost pressures on local authorities. At the same time suitable accommodation is in short supply in the regulated children's homes sector and there are concerns about the increased use of unregulated placements. The situation is particularly acute in London.

Machine learning in children’s services: does it work?

What Works for Children’s Social Care worked with four local authorities to develop models to predict eight outcomes for individual cases. The predictions all focused on a point within the children’s journey where the social worker would be making a decision about whether to intervene in a case or not and the level of intervention required, and looked ahead to see whether the case would escalate at a later point.