The Practice Guides set out the strongest available evidence for leaders in the children’s social care sector to support effective practice and improve how services are commissioned, designed and delivered.

The Practice Guides have been commissioned by the Department for Education, to support delivery of the Children’s Social Care National Framework. The National Framework equips the sector to strengthen services by setting out the purpose and principles of children’s social care and how to achieve better outcomes for children, young people and families. The Practice Guides provide actionable recommendations to help local leaders achieve the outcomes specified in the National Framework. Each Practice Guide is based on a new systematic review of existing evidence, that explores what works, for whom, and in what context, which is in turn translated into actionable key principles and recommendations for local leaders.

We work with our Guidance Writing Advisory Group and other topic-specific advisers, to ensure the Practice Guides are informed by the local contexts service leaders work in, and that the research findings are relevant and relevant to those day-to-day realities.

In October 2024 we published our first Practice Guide on Kinship Care. In February 2025, we published the Parenting Through Adversity Practice Guide (0–10) , followed by the Mentoring and Befriending Practice Guide – for care-experienced children and young people and those at risk of going into care – in early April 2025.

Over the next three years we will publish more Practice Guides across different topics. In 2025/2026 we will publish three Practice Guides:

• Interventions for parent carers of disabled children and young people
• Parenting interventions for families with multiple and complex needs with children aged 11–19
• Interventions for foster carers and adoptive parents.

The Practice Guides can only go as far as the available impact evidence. Unfortunately, in some topic areas, the existing impact evidence is often far stronger overseas than it is in the UK where many services have not yet been evaluated for outcomes. This is because of the historic lack of priority given to some areas of children’s social care in policy and research. This means that in some cases the Practice Guides do not currently make recommendations about UK services even where they resemble features of effective interventions that are highlighted in the guide. We will fill these gaps by funding and evaluating promising support models to strengthen the UK evidence. In time this will enable us to update the recommendations in affected Practice Guides.

Contact Foundations about the Practice Guides

If you are a local leader interested in being involved in our future work on Practice Guides, or have any questions about the Practice Guides, please email our Practice Guides Team, including your job role and organisation.