No Wrong Door Model

Evaluation

Supporting parenting
March 1, 2020

No Wrong Door

Summary

These protocols summarise plans for evaluating the No Wrong Door model roll-out across four local authorities in England, building on a pilot evaluation of No Wrong Door in Middlesbrough 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 roll-out of the No Wrong Door model in four local authorities: Rochdale, Norfolk, Warrington, and Redcar and Cleveland. Leicester was a fifth local authority selected to take part in the trial in 2020 but withdrew before implementation began and is therefore not included in the evaluations. Implementation started in Spring 2020.

Developed in North Yorkshire Council, No Wrong Door is an integrated service for children and young people aged 12 to 25 years old who are Looked After or are on the edge of care. No Wrong Door operates through a hub or outreach model and offers children and young people tailored support from a designated keyworker and a wide range of multi-disciplinary specialists.

The model aims to reduce the need for social care, improve stability, and strengthen children and young people’s outcomes by providing wraparound support adapted to their individual needs, rather than moving them between services to meet these needs.

This evaluation has three strands:

An impact evaluation using a Stepped Wedge Cluster Randomised Control Trial (SW-CRT) design. This means that local authorities begin delivering the model at different times, with all local authorities in the sample eventually implementing No Wrong Door
Alongside the impact evaluation, we will conduct an Implementation and Process Evaluation (IPE) across the four local authorities, to understand delivery during the roll-out 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.

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

Research Questions

Impact evaluations

Both impact evaluations will assess one primary research question about care entry, and three secondary research questions about service-level outcomes that may be impacted by the delivery of No Wrong Door.

Primary research question: What is the impact of No Wrong Door 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 the impact of No Wrong Door on:

The time that children and young people spend in care
Placement stability for children and young people who are in care
The likelihood of young people who are known to CSC services to be not in employment, education, or training (NEET).

Implementation and Process Evaluation (IPE)

The implementation and process evaluation will: assess how the model is delivered across the local authorities and identify any enablers and barriers to delivery; and improve understanding of the model. Its research questions relate specifically to fidelity and adaptation, programme differentiation, reach and acceptability, and mechanisms and outcomes.