Family Safeguarding Model

Trial evaluation

Strengthening family networks
September 6, 2020

Family Safeguarding Model

Summary

These protocols summarise plans for evaluating the Family Safeguarding model rollout across five local authorities in England, building on a pilot evaluation of Family Safeguarding in Cambridgeshire published in 2021.

Who, what, why and how?

As part of the Department for Education’s (DfE) Strengthening Families, Protecting Children (SFPC) programme, we are evaluating the rollout of the Family Safeguarding model in five local authorities: Walsall, Lancashire, Telford & Wrekin, Wandsworth and Swindon.

Developed in Hertfordshire, Family Safeguarding is a whole-family, multi-disciplinary approach that aims to keep children safely at home with their families by tackling the underlying causes of harm.

Family Safeguarding provides targeted support for parents experiencing domestic abuse, substance use, and mental health challenges. The model encompasses five core components: multi-disciplinary teams; Family Safeguarding supervision; Motivational Interviewing; Family Safeguarding Workbook; and the Family Safeguarding Programme.

This evaluation involves three strands:

We will conduct an impact evaluation using a Stepped Wedge Cluster Randomised Control Trial (SW-CRT) design, which means that local authorities start delivering the model at different times, and all local authorities in the sample will eventually implement Family Safeguarding. Implementation started in Autumn 2020.
Alongside the impact evaluation, we will conduct an Implementation and Process Evaluation (IPE) across the five local authorities, to understand delivery during the rollout of the model.
We are also conducting additional analyses to overcome challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic on the trial and programme delivery. To do so, we added a supplementary Difference-in-Differences (DiD) quasi-experimental analysis to the current impact evaluation design.

All the evaluation protocols developed during this project are available on the Open Science Framework (OSF).

Research Questions

Impact evaluations

Both impact evaluations will assess one primary research question about care entry, and five secondary research questions about service-level outcomes that may be impacted by the delivery of Family Safeguarding.

Primary research question: What is the impact of Family Safeguarding on children’s likelihood of becoming looked after within 18 months of a referral to children’s social care services?

Our secondary research questions will address what the impact of Family Safeguarding is on:

The likelihood of children to return to statutory services after the closure of a child protection plan
The likelihood of children to progress to a child protection plan
The time that children spend on a child protection plan
The likelihood of children being re-referred to children’s social care services for parental substance use, domestic abuse, or parental mental health issues
Unauthorised school absences for children referred to children’s social care services.

Implementation and Process Evaluation (IPE)

The IPE will assess how the model is delivered across the local authorities and identify any elements of successful delivery, as well as improving the understanding of the model. Its research questions relate specifically to fidelity and adaptation, programme differentiation, reach and acceptability, and mechanisms and outcomes.