Inter-disciplinary research/innovative policy and
practice: How to manage the interface effectively
Centre for Social Work Innovation and Research
University of Sussex
12 October 2015
Judy Sebba
Director, Rees Centre for Research in Fostering and
Education
University of Oxford Department of Education
judy.sebba@education.ox.ac.uk
Rees Centre for Research in Fostering and Education
The Rees Centre aims to:
• identify what works to improve the outcomes and
life chances of children and young people in foster
care
We are doing this by:
• reviewing existing research in order to make better
use of current evidence
• conducting new research to address gaps
• working with service users to identify research
priorities and translate research messages into
practice
• employing foster carers and care experienced
young people as co-researchers
• developing research-mindedness in the services
Centre is funded by the Core Assets Group and has
grants from a range of other funders
Rees Centre Research overview
Reviews
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Motivation to foster (2012);
Peer support between foster carers (2013);
Selection of foster carers (2013);
Impact of fostering on foster carers’ own children (2013);
Effective parent-and-child fostering;
Mental health interventions for LAC (NSPCC, 2014);
Role of the Supervising Social Worker (2014);
Recruitment & selection of LGBT carers (2015);
Educational outcomes of LAC (2015);
Impact of siblings placements (due Nov 2015).
Research Projects – completed and current
• Investigating people’s motivation to foster (completed);
• Increasing the benefits of foster care support (completed);
• Mental health of children in care across primary-secondary school
transition (with Surrey NHS Trust & Sussex University);
• Impact on carers of allegations (pilot completed, main study funded
FosterTalk/Sir Halley Stewart Trust);
• Educational progress of children in care (completed, funded Nuffield);
• Evaluation of the Siblings Together programme (funded Siblings Together)
• Evaluation of Step Down (moving children from residential to foster care,
funded by Social Impact Bond/Cardiff CC and Birmingham LA);
• Evaluation of pan-London Achievement for All/foster carer training to
support education (with Loughborough, funded by GLA);
• DfE Children’s Social Care Innovation Fund – Evaluation Coordinator (57
projects, 22 evaluation teams, quality control of evaluations, funded DfE);
• Evaluation of Elev8 (intensive fostering for youth offenders);
• Evaluation of Attachment-Aware Schools Programme (funded by Bath and
NE Somerset LA);
Doctoral research projects on education of children in care, impact of types of
care in Romania, health experiences of children in care and characteristics
and selection of foster carers in Portugal and England.
Aim of the session
Explore how research, policy and practice speak effectively
together and with integrity, where innovation has become the
primary task.
Should innovation be the primary task? Does innovation improve
people’s lives?
What is innovation? Definition provided by NESTA in our project:
The development and dissemination of a new product, service or
process that produces economic, social or cultural change.
Little doubt that we can all identify areas of children’s social care
that need economic, social or cultural change. But is innovation
the best way to achieve this?
In NESTA project, ‘innovative’ applied to the initial idea or any
part of the implementation process.
Challenges
• Generate and ‘translate’ (for practice) research findings/data
analysis including evaluation of others’ innovations that are capable
of leading to improvement
AND informs sustainability, roll out and maybe further innovation;
• Finding ways of ensuring your findings hit the button with policymakers at the right time;
• To develop practice that reflects ‘evidence’ without having every
social worker/teacher completing a doctorate;
• To maintain your research integrity throughout.
Which do you currently do best and why?
The Children’s Social Care Innovation Programme
• 57 projects, 22 evaluation teams, Rees Centre coordinates
evaluation & provides over-arching evaluation of programme;
• Over half all LAs involved, 55% of projects led by LAs;
• Three main areas:
 Rethinking children’s social work – improving the quality and
impact of children’s social work – 16 projects;
 Rethinking support for adolescents in or on the edge of care –
improving the quality and impact of services for adolescents
to transition successfully into adulthood – 5 projects;
 Other priorities – residential, adoption, mental health, CSE,
housing, commissioning and delegation - 36
Started Jan-now 2015, end March 2016
Truly innovative???
Generating findings that are capable of leading
to improvement
• Engage practitioners and policy makers from the outset –
inform research questions, data collection methods &
interpretations – at all levels of practice – impact ongoing;
• Does the evidence allow us ‘to intervene with the most
benefit and the least harm’ as Oakley (2000) urged us to;
• Value of full range of methodologies is acknowledged – IP
reiterate principle of evaluations being fit for purpose but
national policymaking inevitably needs numbers, practice
needs examples – better understanding of mixed methods;
• Work through implications to targeted recommendations;
• Taking account of context - innovations developed elsewhere
or that are to be implemented elsewhere, transferability?
•
Oakley, A. (2000) Experiments in Knowing. London: John Wiley.
The current evidence base in children’s services
(adapted from Stevens, M., Liabo, K., Witherspoon, S. and Roberts, H. (2009) What do practitioners want
from research, what do funders fund and what needs to be done to know more about what works in the
new world of children's services? Evidence & policy: vol 5, no 3: 281-294
Methods (selective)
used in 625 studies
No of
studies
% of
studies
Qualitative
230
37
Mixed method
108
17
Longitudinal
74
12
Quantitative dataset analysis
16
3
Non-randomised trial
8
1
RCT
3
<1
Systematic review
2
<1
Hitting the button with policymakers/funders
• Early negotiation of expectations is crucial;
• Understanding their concerns, interests and trying to reframe
these as evaluation or research questions;
• Timing – maybe not now but findings can still be relevant later
e.g. permanence research, AfL, etc. used years later;
• Only the research analysts are interested in your methodology
and technical debates – just bare essentials;
• Don’t underestimate the power of senior civil servants over
ministers – continuity is important source of power;
• Keep communications crisp, clear and short – keep the
discursive debate for your academic colleagues;
• Stay positive, constructive, flexible, adopt ‘can do’ approach.
Developing practice that reflects evidence
Sounds so easy, so difficult to achieve.
• Engage as co-researchers with training, realistically, though
Gray et al (2015) noted that some want to be engaged in trhe
whole process while others prefer translated ‘guidelines’;
• Help practitioners to avoid ‘recycling garbage’ by replacing the
footprints of gurus with some ‘knowledge claims’;
• Get managers on board with developing better use of
research by starting with their key concerns;
• Researchers-in-residence, embedded researchers?
• Professional expectations – still not expected to use research
in SW or teaching standards.
Gray, M., Joy, E., Plath, D., & Webb, S. A. (2015). What supports and impedes evidencebased practice implementation? A survey of Australian social workers. British Journal of
Social Work, 45(2), 667-684.
Maintaining your research integrity
• Winch (2001) warns of the dangers of giving the sponsors what it is
they want to hear in order to increase the chances of influencing
and being consulted in the future;
• He notes the opposite extreme of failing to understand and
acknowledge views that extend beyond the researcher’s own ideals
by remaining ‘excessively true to oneself’;
• Both are important. Be prepared to say no or not yet but also be
prepared to ‘drip feed’ best estimate to date;
• Reiterate the ethical principles by which you operate, in particular
when service providers seem happy to impose data collection on
their service users without their consent;
• Look to your colleagues for support!
Winch, C. (2001) Accountability and relevance in educational research Journal of
Philosophy of Education 35, 443-459
Preventing and treating poor mental health
http://reescentre.education.ox.ac.uk/research/mental-health/
• Report commissioned by NSPCC
• Practitioners need to know whether a particular intervention
is likely to work
• Report provides an indication of the strength of the evidence
for a range of interventions
• Also looks at the context in which these interventions operate
– i.e. the importance of 'ordinary care' as an intervention in itself
– evaluations of interventions often miss out the importance of
context and children's individual experiences
– important to think how quality of care environment and
decisions made can influence well-being before using targeted
(and often costly) interventions
School for Policy Studies
The Educational Progress of Looked After Children in England:
Linking Care and Educational Data
Funded by The Nuffield Foundation
February 2014 – April 2015
Educational outcomes of looked after children in England
(Source: DfE, 2013)
Project aims and purpose
• What are the key factors contributing to the low educational
outcomes of children in care in secondary schools in England?
• How does linking care and educational data contribute to our
understanding of how to improve their attainment and progress?
To inform resource priorities of central and local government,
practice of professionals and the databases used to monitor
outcomes.
School for Policy Studies
Research design
How did we do this?
• Linking national data sets on the education (National Pupil
Database) and care experiences of looked after children in
England (SSDA903)
– to explore the relationship between educational outcomes, the
children’s care histories and individual characteristics, and practice
and policy in different local authorities
• Interviews with 36 children in six local authorities and with their
carers, teachers, social workers and Virtual School staff
– to complement and expand on the statistical analyses, and to explore
factors not recorded in the databases (e.g. foster carers’ attitudes to
education, role of the Virtual School) – FCs and YP co-researchers.
C There are 10 main barriers to radical improvement and innovation in
children’s services in England (1/3)
External context
▪
▪
▪
▪
Significant
growth in
demand e.g.
looked-after
children
1.8% pa
Confusion on
State’s role in
sector
Intense public
and media
response to
public scandal
puts spotlight on
industry
LA facing
significant
budget
pressure –will
increasingly be
looking to
children’s
services for
efficiencies
Structure
C1 LAs can lack the critical
mass and organisational
competence to
commission for radical
improvement and
innovation in services
C2 Service provider
organisations aren’t
always incentivised to
radically improve and
innovate their services
Conduct
C3 Frontline social care staff don’t always have
the time, skills or confidence to radically
improve and innovate services
Performance
▪
C4 LA leadership can lack capability and
incentives to radically improve and innovate
services
C5 There are some legal barriers, and many
perceived barriers, to radically improving
and innovating services
C6 New innovations often fail to ‘spark’, and
proven innovations often fail to spread
effectively across LAs
C7 Poor data quality and availability makes it
hard for social workers, LAs, regulators, and
central government to drive radical
improvement and innovation
C8 Current performance management system
tends to promote compliance rather than
radical improvement or innovation
C9 Challenges in collaboration at the
interface of different agencies limits
innovation, particularly for child protection
▪
▪
High variability
across LAs in child
outcomes:
– Highest GCSE
attainment gap
~2.6x size of the
lowest)
– Care quality (%
of children
experiencing <3
placements)
highest is 1.4x
lowest)
– Value for money
(up to 7.5x more
costly)
Limited correlation
between spend and
outcomes
There is a significant
gap in outcomes
between cared-for
children and other
children e.g. 44%
attainment gap at
GCSE
C10 Culture of resistance to change and risk
aversion
0
Challenging our own practice – Knowledge Claims
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
The quality of ‘ordinary care’ influences the outcomes of mental health
interventions – what are we doing to help social workers improve
‘ordinary care’ before requesting specialist services e.g. MST?
Young people who changed school in Year 10 or 11 scored 33.9 points
(over five grades) less at GCSE than those who did not - what are you
doing to ensure social workers prevent this?
Preparing and supporting carers’ own children for fostering reduces
placement disruptions – how is this done in the services?
Do the social workers you train who become Supervisory Social Workers
challenge foster carers as well as supporting them?
Do the services undertake assessments of potential LGBT carers that
include questions that would not be asked of other potential carers?
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