NEW: The Kinship Care Practice Guide translates the strongest evidence into actionable recommendations. Find out more.
The Practice Guides have been commissioned by the Department for Education (DfE) to support delivery of the Children’s Social Care National Framework. The Framework aims to support the sector to strengthen services for children, young people and families through explaining the principles behind, and the purpose of children’s social care. The Practice Guides bring together the strongest evidence on how to achieve the outcomes outlined in the Framework. The Key Principles and Recommendations in the Practice Guides are designed to inform service development and design by providing local decision-makers with easy-to-access, clear and concise information about the kinds of support shown by rigorous evidence to be most effective.
Each of the Practice Guides is underpinned by findings from a systematic review which asks questions about interventions and/or programmes to find out what works, for whom, how and why. The systematic review also pulls together evidence on child, family and practitioner perspectives on interventions and how beneficial they think they are, as well as evidence on barriers and enablers to successful implementation of interventions.
The Practice Guides are produced using scientific frameworks and methods common to guidance production among What Works Centres. When writing the Practice Guides, we also take into consideration related guidance and recommendations. For example, we will work closely with the National Practice Group, the Department for Education, and the sector to ensure our guides do not conflict with statutory guidance. We will also consider the recommendations from the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel where relevant and triangulate these with our findings from the systematic review.
The National Kinship Strategy focusses on improving support for kinship families. The Kinship Care Practice Guide sets out what kinds of support have been proven to improve outcomes for these families. The recommendations set out in the Practice Guide will help local authorities to achieve the best possible support for kinship families.
Our systematic reviews make a conscious effort to include evidence related specifically to children and families from minoritised ethnic backgrounds. We do this by expanding our search for evidence to capture interventions that have been found to be effective for specific population groups. We use the PRISMA-equity checklist, which is an equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) tool designed to help researchers identify, extract, and pull together evidence on equity in systematic reviews.
To capture the experiences and perspectives of diverse groups of users /beneficiaries, our systematic review suppliers are also encouraged to consult with those with lived experience when making decisions about population scope for the systematic review, literature search terms, and the use of appropriate terminologies. The development of each Guide is also supported by the Practice Guides Guidance Writing Advisory Group, alongside our Experts by Experience Panel and subject matter experts on each specific topic. In combination, this brings a wide and diverse range of voices from different backgrounds with lived experience, sector and academic expertise and that guides the development of the Guides.
Local authorities are facing complex and significant resource pressures that make it more imperative than ever that decisions about service design are informed by robust and impartial evidence about what has been shown to improve outcomes. DfE statutory guidance on Kinship care states: “Local authorities should consult the DfE commissioned Practice Guide, which brings together the evidence on programmes or services that aim to support kinship families.” Evidence about what has been shown to work should be considered alongside knowledge of the local context, needs of children and families locally and cost to make decisions. In time, local areas may choose to decommission interventions and programmes that shown to positively impact outcomes for children and families.
The definition of kinship care used in the Kinship Care Practice Guide is the definition used by the Department for Education, as set out in Championing Kinship Care: The National Kinship Care Strategy (2023, p.44).
We include a variety of types of evidence in our systematic reviews that inform the Practice Guides. This includes high quality evidence on the impact of specific interventions and services, drawn from rigorous impact evaluations. We also include evidence from mixed-methods and qualitative research on issues such as implementation of services, and on user needs and experiences. As a What Works Centre, we have evidence standards for assessing whether an intervention or service is effective for child or family outcomes and will only make recommendations on what works based on at least one impact evaluation.
Additionally, from our experience with local areas, we know how valuable local best practice and learning is for professionals and families, and we hold this in mind. Where practitioner-level evidence exists, it will be included in Practice Guides for local areas to consider.
Where our legacy organisations’ (What Works for Children’s Social Care and the Early Intervention Foundation) research meets the criteria of a systematic review, it will be included and go forward into forming our conclusions for the specific Practice Guide. We continue to strive to produce robust evidence, and where appropriate, this evidence will be included in any future systematic reviews to inform the Practice Guides’ conclusions.
Each Practice Guide is underpinned by a systematic review. The criteria for evidence to be included in each systematic review can be found in published protocols on the Foundations website. Where relevant, the systematic review will synthesise both primary (e.g., randomised controlled trials) and secondary evidence (e.g., reviews). We will also carry out grey literature searches. This will allow us to capture literature which is not included in formal academic databases to ensure our search is as complete as possible.
As a What Works Centre we have a responsibility to tell our audience about interventions, programmes and practices that are proven to be most effective through evidence. Impact evaluations such as randomised controlled trials are the strongest method for proving impacts on child and family outcomes. For Practice Guides, we recognise the importance of acceptability, fidelity and adaptability of a particular intervention or practice to facilitate our thinking around ‘what works, for whom, how and why’ and on implementation. Most of the Practice Guides will be based on a mixed-methods systematic review, which includes quantitative evidence, and mixed-methods evidence and qualitative evidence. This allows us to include aspects such as participant voice and user experience in our guidance.
It is also important to acknowledge that the Practice Guides can only go as far as the available impact evidence. Right now, unfortunately, this is often far stronger overseas than it is in the UK where many services have not yet been evaluated for outcomes. This means that the Kinship Care Practice Guide is not currently able to make recommendations about UK services even where they resemble features of effective interventions that are highlighted in the guide.
This is no reflection on those working tirelessly to provide services to kinship families, many of whom are keen to evaluate their services. Instead, it reflects the historic lack of priority given previously to kinship care in policy and research. We want to change this. We will be imminently opening a new funding round to fund and evaluate promising support models for kinship carers in a UK context, which will strengthen the UK evidence and in time enable us to update the recommendations in the Kinship Care Practice Guide.
The Practice Guide topics are agreed between the Department for Education (DfE) and Foundations in consultation with the National Practice Group. Decisions are made by:
Future topics include Parenting Interventions for Families with Multiple and Complex Needs, and Mentoring and Befriending.
We are convening advisory groups to support the Practice Guides. These advisory groups include senior leaders from local areas and individuals with expertise in particular practice areas. We are keen to hear from senior local leaders and subject matter experts who would like to be involved in developing and/or improving future Practice Guides. Please include an overview of your experience in your email to our Practice Guides Team.