Call for participants for project to evaluate multi-agency working in children’s social care

What Works for Children’s Social Care (WWCSC) is seeking participants for the extension of its Practice In Need of Evidence programme, examining multi-agency partnerships working to improve outcomes in children’s social care.

WWCSC is seeking applications from any statutory agencies involved in multi-agency partnership work to improve outcomes for children who are engaged with children’s social care.

The basis of this project is the understanding that children are best safeguarded when professionals work together closely and effectively, and that, as with many aspects of child safeguarding, there is a lack of evidence about the most effective ways of multi-agency working.

The PINE programme aims to build an evidence base for existing and new practice that demonstrate impact on outcomes for children and young people who need to be safeguarded. The centre is particularly interested in multi-agency working between children’s social care, police and health services, but other statutory agencies are welcome to apply.

The PINE programme will provide a high quality evaluation of the participating practices, with the opportunity for future work with WWCSC to scale up the practice and undertake more research.

Michael Sanders (pictured), Executive Director, What Works for Children’s Social Care, said: “We know that agencies need to work together effectively and seamlessly to safeguard children at risk, however, we are less sure about the best ways of going about this. We are, therefore, delighted to be extending our existing Practice In Need of Evidence programme to grow the evidence base around multi-agency working. Great, collaborative work is happening all over the country and we want to help our partners to evaluate it so it can be shared more widely and help more children and families, nationwide.

Florence Kroll, Director for Children’s Services, Royal Borough of Greenwich, participant in the ongoing PINE programme, said: “As a pioneer partner of WWCSC we used the DEMO tool to identify our areas of strength and opportunities for improvement in how we use our leadership, culture, and skills to create and support a network of evidence-minded practice leaders who could be active participants in shaping practice development.

“Over sixty social workers and team leaders attended our very successful workshop on ‘Practice for Change’ which looked at relationship based practice, systemic approaches, reflective supervision and whole family meetings. Based upon the learning from that we will be working with the Centre to trial and evaluate a whole service Practice Week that focuses on using research evidence, practitioner expertise and the experience of families to improve practice and outcomes.”

Interested applicants can find more and submit an application via the What Works for Children’s Social Care website by 29 November 2019.

Picture (c) What Works for Children’s Social Care .