How can we support local authorities to use the best available evidence to improve practice in Children’s Social Care?

Next week Foundations will publish the first in a series of new national Practice Guides that provide local authorities and partner organisations with the most up-to-date and rigorous evidence yet about ‘what works’ in Children’s Social Care (CSC). Our first Practice Guide recommends the types of support that are most likely to be effective in supporting kinship carers, and the children they care for.

Commissioned by the Department for Education (DfE), Practice Guides will bring together the strongest evidence from the UK and abroad about how best to achieve the objectives in the Children’s Social Care National Framework (CSCNF) (2023).¹ They are designed to help local leaders plan and deliver effective help and support for children and families by providing clarity about the support and interventions that have been shown to improve outcomes.

We know that as well as generating and sharing evidence about what works in children’s social care, attention also needs to be given to ensuring that this evidence is used. To help us with this, we commissioned research by the Institute of Public Care at Oxford Brookes University to help us understand what can get in the way of evidence use in local authorities and how our Practice Guides might help to overcome these.²

The research shows that there is a clear appetite among local authorities for evidence-based approaches to children’s social care, and leaders agreed that robust evidence builds confidence, trust and assurance in commissioning and in service delivery. It also provides three valuable insights about how to get evidence used by local authorities, which informed how we produced our Practice Guides:

1. Local authorities want high-quality evidence that is easy to access and understand. It can be difficult for them to appraise technical evidence when they do not always have the expertise and resources available to do this consistently.  
2. Local authority leaders and practitioners with responsibility for using guidance should help shape the Practice Guides, as should the experience of children and families, and other relevant experts.
3. The Practice Guides should be presented and mobilised in a way that enables local authorities to easily adopt evidence-based approaches.

Taking this on board, we have aimed to ensure that Practice Guides are relevant, realistic and actionable for local authority leaders and practitioners, in three ways.

1.  Bringing together high-quality evidence for local leaders

Our Practice Guides are underpinned by systematic reviews of international evidence about the impact of services and interventions shown to bring about real change in children’s lives.³ This means that local authorities can trust that the Practice Guides are based on the best research available about the impacts of different approaches in children’s social care, tailored to populations like theirs.

The Guides not only include high-quality quantitative analysis, but also draw on qualitative research into the views of families and children.  The Practice Guide on Kinship Care, for example, is underpinned by a study of the opinions and experiences of kinship families.

2. Involving those whom the Practice Guides are aimed at in their production

We formed a Guidance Writing Advisory Group (GWAG) of local authority senior leaders, people with lived experience, national sector organisations and academics to help produce the Practice Guides. For each different topic covered by the Practice Guides, the GWAG is supplemented by advisers with in-depth, subject-specific knowledge. The role of the combined Advisory Groups is to:

• Support Foundations to translate robust research findings into actionable recommendations for senior leaders
• Bring ‘real world’ insights to ensure that the Practice Guides are relevant and useful to senior leaders across the sector and applicable in local areas
• Promote and support consistently high standards across all the Practice Guides.

3. Ensuring the Practice Guides are easy and feasible to use

The Practice Guides contain clear principles and recommendations in accessible language so they can be easily understood and put into practice. Senior local authority leaders on the GWAG,⁴ along with the national charities and service providers on the Advisory Group, have helped us ensure recommendations fit the current context and existing practice landscape in children’s social care, and are feasible to implement locally.

Producing the first Practice Guide has been a significant endeavour, but it is also important to acknowledge that 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 does not currently 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 further evaluate their services. Instead, it reflects the historic lack of priority previously given to kinship care in policy and research. We want to change this and 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 guide. 

Practice Guides are developed alongside the advice and collective expertise of experts by experience, practitioners, researchers, and senior leaders. Together, we’ve created a resource that not only reflects the best available evidence but is also designed to be practical and adaptable for real-world application. We look forward to continuing this journey with all our partners, driving forward the shared mission of improving outcomes for children and families.

1. The Children’s Social Care National Framework is statutory guidance on the principles behind children’s social care, its purpose, factors enabling good practice and what it should achieve: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/childrens-social-care-national-framework ↩︎
2. Foundations commissioned the Institute of Public Care (IPC) to carry out research to increase understanding of how evidence is used in commissioning, service design, and the development of practice and programme models, to support children and families. The project looked at a mixed sample of 9 local authorities in England and a total of 73 professionals participated in interviews and focus groups. Read the final report. ↩︎
3. The Kinship Care Practice Guide is based on a comprehensive systematic review of the evidence, conducted by the Centre for Evidence and Implementation (CEI). This review included the findings from 21 studies about the impact of what works from around the world, and six qualitative studies on carer and practitioner experiences in the UK. Read the systematic review. ↩︎
4. There are three senior local authority leaders on the GWAG: Amanda Perraton (Director of Children’s Services, Warrington Borough Council); Cath McEvoy-Carr (Director of Children, Education & Skills, Newcastle City Council); and Rasheed Pendry (Deputy Director of Children’s Services, Wandsworth Borough Council). You can see all members of the GWAG here. ↩︎