“Substantial work” is needed to improve the recording and reporting of data on family group conferences (FGCs,) ahead of an expected increase in their use on the back of government legislation.

That was among the conclusions of a study commissioned by Department for Education-funded evidence body Foundations into council approaches to collecting and analysing data on FGCs.

It comes with the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill set to introduce a duty for councils to offer families a family group decision making (FGDM) meeting – an umbrella term for FGC-style provision – when they are considering issuing care proceedings.

On the back of the research, published this week, Foundations has commissioned charities Coram and the Family Rights Group (FRG) to collect data from councils, on a voluntary basis, on access to, and take up of, FGCs, as part of wider research.

Impact of FGCs on preventing children going into care

In a children’s services context, FGCs are family-led meetings, organised by a practitioner (the FGC co-ordinator), giving extended families the opportunity to make plans for children where there are concerns about their safety and wellbeing. They are generally in-house council services, though some authorities outsource the function.

Previous Foundations-commissioned research, published in 2023, found children whose families were referred to an FGC at the pre-proceedings stage were significantly less likely to be in care 12 months later than those whose families were not so referred.

The finding is one of the key factors behind the government’s planned duty, which is likely to lead to a significant increase in the use of FGCs.

‘Very little information’ on how councils record FGC data

The 2023 study found that, though the vast majority of English councils offered FGCs at the pre-proceedings stage, there was “very little information on what or how local authorities recorded or reported on [them]” and no routinely collected data on the extent to which they were offered and taken up.

As a result, it was not possible to know who was receiving the service and what their outcomes were.

The latest study, produced by Coram, the FRG, FGC provider Daybreak and sector data organisation Data 2 Insight, was designed to understand what data councils collected on FGCs, particularly  at pre-proceedings, the enablers and barriers to them collecting and reporting on data and how a national data collection may be developed.

It involved in-depth site visits to three councils, interviews with staff from 10 other authorities, two parent-carer discussions and analysis of previous work on FGC data collection.

‘Substantial work’ needed on improving data

The study concluded that “substantial work” was needed to improve both the recording and reporting of FGC data by councils.

Councils recorded a range of data, including on referrals, the planning of FGCs, conference meetings, including attendance, FGC plans and reviews and feedback from families and professionals at closure, including views on outcomes.

In some areas, almost all FGC information was recorded on the children’s social care case management system (CMS), often in a specific microsite, while in others, only limited information was stored on CMS, meaning they used spreadsheets “extensively”.

There were advantages and disadvantages to each approach, the study said. While services that predominantly used spreadsheets were able to create and adapt these easily to capture all the information they required, “data entry was manual and therefore required significant capacity”, the report said.

But while services that relied more on CMS required less manual data entry, it was difficult for them to customise FGC data collection, meaning they did not record all of the information they wanted. Also, CMS were much more difficult to adapt and change than spreadsheets, with FGC services sometimes waiting years for changes.

Variation in data quality

There was “substantial variation in the quality of FGC data and in data quality assurance processes”, the report said.

Some services were “quite limited” in what they did to quality assure their data, while others did regular audits of FGC data on their CMS to check for errors or inconsistencies.

Challenges for councils included recording FGC data for each child within a family where they each had separate records on the CMS, and situations when the child was not known to children’s social care and so was not on the CMS. The latter situation tended to result in data being saved outside the case management system.

Data reporting was largely focused on workflow and outputs, such as the number and origins of referrals, the proportion of referrals that resulted in an FGC, the number of FGC meetings and plans completed and details of who attended.

Limited analysis of equity of provision

While services often looked at why families did not take up an FGC, most did not carry out detailed analysis of the factors influencing refusal, such as the characteristics of the family and the point at which a conference were offered.

No council studied looked at equity of access or provision of an FGC, for example, based on the legal status of the child or family demographics compared to the wider population, mainly because of the lack of population-wide data.

“As a result, services were limited in their ability to look at access, especially in terms of equity, diversity, and inclusion,” the research report said.

There was also “limited data” reported on the content of FGC plans, other than to report that the plan had been agreed, sent to families and uploaded onto the CMS.

Lack of reporting on outcomes

While some services reported on satisfaction children’s families’ and professionals’ satisfaction with FGCs, this was stymied by low response rates to feedback, while there was a lack of reporting  on outcomes or impact because of difficulties measuring these.

And though some services looked at measures such as the legal status or living arrangements of the child six or 12 months after an FGC, most acknowledged that it was difficult to attribute these outcomes to an FGC given the many other factors that could have contributed.

FGC service representatives interviewed generally wanted a national data collection to provide benchmarking information, including to measure the impact they were having on social care outcomes for children and any potential cost savings.

However, they raised concerns about how this would work, including because of the differences in FGC services between areas and the difficulties in measuring outcomes.

Creating a national data collection

The study recommended a phased approach to creating a national data collection, which should be co-designed with the sector, account for variations between services and minimise burdens on local authorities.

It said this should start with a voluntary survey of councils to collect aggregated data, without details about individual children or families, which could pave the way for a national data collection of child-level information.

This is being taken forward by Foundations, as part of research it has commissioned from Coram and FRG on how FGCs are offered to families in England and the factors influencing their decision to accept or reject the offer.

National survey of local authorities

Coram and FRG are carrying out a voluntary survey of councils, which covers:

• What an FGC looks like in their area, the process is for making referrals, the number of children that were subject to an FGC referral in 2023-24 and information about them.
• The process around how FGCs are offered to parent/carers, the number of FGCs consented to in 2023-24, the number children in these cases and information about these children.
• The number of FGCs that took place in 2023-24, the number of children involved and information about the children, along with the the number of FGCs that did not take place in 2023-24 and reasons for this.

Data is being collected via an excel template, which can be obtained by emailing Impactandevaluation@coram.org.uk.

The deadline for the data collection is Friday 4 April 2025 and returns should be emailed to Impactandevaluation@coram.org.uk.

Data collection ‘critical’ for ensuring success of policy

Foundations chief executive Jo Casebourne said the collection would “build a clearer picture of what is happening with FGCs across the country and support local authorities to ensure that they are not only accessible but also make a real difference for families and children”.

FRG chief executive Cathy Ashley stressed that the new research was “critical for ensuring the new national family group decision making offer and future policy changes will have real, lasting impact”.

There is strong evidence that parenting support services improve outcomes for children and adults in families experiencing adversity, councils have been told.

The latest government-commissioned practice guide to what works in children’s social care said interventions for parents of children aged 0-10 could improve parenting practices and child behaviour, lessen levels of stress and support adults mental health.

It also highlighted the vital importance of practitioners’ skills in building trusting relationships with, and in empowering, parents, and also the value placed by staff and parents alike on interventions that recognised the interconnections between parents’ and children’s needs.

Case for prioritising parenting support ‘has never been stronger’

Sector what works body Foundations, which published the guide today, said it was based on the first major review of UK and international evidence on parenting support for families experiencing adversity, including adult mental health problems, substance misuse or domestic abuse.

On the back of the guide, Foundations’ deputy chief executive, Donna Molloy said: “As councils struggle to cope with the costs of children’s social care, our evidence shows that proven models of parenting support can help to keep children safe with their families, improve their outcomes and alleviate pressure on an already overstretched system.

“The case for prioritising proven parenting interventions has never been stronger.”

Evidence to meet government social care outcomes

The practice guide is the second of a series of Department for Education-commissioned resources from Foundations designed to provide senior leaders in councils and partner agencies with the strongest available evidence to deliver on the outcomes in the children’s social care national framework.

The DfE-issued statutory guidance, published in 2023 under the previous government’s children’s social care reforms, sets four overarching objectives for the sector and three key enablers for achieving them:

• Outcome 1: children, young people and families stay together and get the help they need.
• Outcome 2: children and young people are supported by their family network.
• Outcome 3: children and young people are safe in and outside of their homes.
• Outcome 4: children in care and care leavers have stable, loving homes.
• Enabler 1: multi-agency working is prioritised and effective.
• Enabler 2: leaders drive conditions for effective practice.
• Enabler 3: the workforce is equipped and effective.

The first guide, on kinship care, was published in October last year, and the one on parenting through adversity for parents of babies and children aged 0-10 is the first of four on parenting support. The others will cover support for families in adversity with children aged 11-19, parents or carers of children with disabilities or severe mental illness and adoptive and foster parents.

Rising parental mental health needs ahead of family help reforms

The parenting through adversity guide comes amid a growth in the numbers of children in need assessments identifying parental mental health or substance misuse problems, which directors of children’s services have warned is increasing risks to the youngest children.

At the same time, councils are set to implement significant reforms to the way they support families, through the rollout of the family help model in 2025-26.

This involves the merger of targeted early help and child in need services into multidisciplinary teams, designed to provide families experiencing adversity with early, non-stigmatising help, =to resolve issues and prevent them escalating into child protection concerns.

Though the government is providing a £270m grant to implement the changes, the reforms come with councils under significant financial strain.

Guide ‘will help councils focus resources on what works’

Foundations’ head of practice guides, social worker Nimal Jude, said the latest guide would enable authorities to determine where to invest their resources.

“We are acutely aware of some of the workforce pressures and the wider financial situations that local areas are in,” she said. 

“It feels like this guide has come at such a crucial time during this transformation to family help, because you can really make some decisions about what things that you might want to scale back and what things that you might want to focus attention on, not least because you can now focus your attention with the full confidence that this is actually the best available evidence.”

The evidence base

The guide is based on two systematic reviews of the evidence around parenting support for families with multiple and complex needs.

The first, carried out by the Centre for Evidence and Implementation (CEI), in partnership with the universities of Oxford, Amsterdam and Monash, examined which interventions relevant to the UK, had the strongest evidence for reducing child maltreatment or improving child outcomes, along with what practice and delivery approaches contributed to success.

It examined 95 randomised controlled trials – where participants are randomly allocated into a group that receives the intervention and a control group – of 50 parenting interventions, finding:

• Small to moderate statistically significant effects on children’s emotional and behavioural problems, child wellbeing and parent-child relationships.
• Small to moderate statistically significant effects on promoting positive parenting (for example, appropriate disciplining, praise, warmth, and nurturing behaviours) and reducing negative parenting (for example, hostile parenting or laxness).
• Small statistically significant effects on parental mental health and reducing parental stress.
• Small but non-significant effects on reducing parental maltreatment and child abuse risk.

Strengthening parent-child relationships 

Based on the CEI’s systematic review, Foundations said there was “strong evidence” for the benefits of providing parenting interventions to strengthen parent-child relationships, and that councils should make these available to families with children aged 0-3.

It said these should be based on, and delivered by practitioners well-trained in, attachment and/or social learning theory (which posits that children learn through observation, including parental modelling). These staff should be able to observe and reflect on how parents respond to children’s cues and explore parents’ own attachment experiences.

The guide also said there was “strong evidence” for councils commissioning interventions to improve child behaviours, reduce negative parenting practices and improve positive practices.

Improving child behaviour and parenting practices

In relation to behaviour, key features shared by effective interventions were supporting parents in setting clear expectations and boundaries and promoting child-led interactions.

Promoting positive parenting can include practitioners taking on a coaching role, which requires them being skilled in coaching techniques and being able to build long-lasting, trusting relationships with parents.

The guide also said there was “strong evidence” that parenting interventions can reduce parental stress and improve mental health for those with mild-to-moderate problems.

Improving mental health

It said practitioners should be skilled in understanding the impacts of stress on parents experiencing adversity and should be given time to develop relationships with them, to enable parents to learn new skills and make use of feedback.

While the guide stressed that that parenting interventions were not sufficient to achieve significant changes to mental health, it said there was evidence they could improve parenting skills, even in adults with clinical levels of illness.

It said these programmes should involve practitioners offering guidance on child development and supporting parents’ abilities to manage their emotions.

Evidence ‘promising’ in relation to reducing harm

On reducing the risk of harm to children, Foundations said the level of evidence for parenting interventions was “promising”.

It said programmes that involved a fixed and structured series of sessions tended to be more effective in this area than those that were flexible.

The guide added that local leaders should examine the need to invest in these services for families with children on the edge of care and in the rollout of family help.

Vital importance of practitioners’ interpersonal skills

Alongside the CEI review, Foundations carried out its own systematic review of studies on the barriers and enablers to successful implementation of parenting interventions for families in adversity and on parents’ views, experiences and preferences in relation to these. This drew upon 33 studies.

Among two findings that had “high” certainty, based on the strength of the evidence, was that practitioner interpersonal behaviours were “essential to building trusting relationships and empowering parents”.

The review said parents valued practitioner characteristics such as openness, non-judgmentalism and encouragement, which facilitated the development of the trust that was “essential” in promoting change.

Building trust was supported by an initial home visit, communication outside of scheduled sessions, regular attendance from the parent and a consistent workforce, with parents highlighting the challenges of doing so when workers changed.

Recognising that parents’ and children’s needs are ‘intertwined’

The other finding that was deemed to be of high certainty was that both parents and practitioners value interventions that recognise “the intertwined relationship between parents’ practical and psychological needs and the needs of their children”.

Practitioners appreciated that supporting the parent, by focusing on their practical, social and emotional needs, was often the best way to help the child, with this approach welcomed by parents, the review said.

Based on its review, Foundations identified 12 principles for working with families in delivering parenting interventions:

1. Tailoring parenting support to ages and stages of child development.
2. Using strengths-based approaches to engage parents and offering parenting support across the system.
3. Ensuring that parents from minoritised ethnic backgrounds have equitable access to effective parenting interventions and that these are delivered in a way that fully meets
   their needs.
4. Understanding that parenting interventions work well for families where the parent has poor mental health, and, when delivered successfully, support parents to improve parent and child outcomes.
5. Prioritising face-to-face delivery of support.
6. Implementing both fixed and flexible delivery models to support a mixed local offer and prioritising more structured interventions to effectively reduce the risk of serious harm to children, directing resources where they are most needed.
7. Tailoring local programmes to meet the specific needs of families, offering both group and individual options to support engagement and provide parents with choice.
8. Focusing on careful implementation, effective delivery, and ongoing quality assurance to ensure the success of interventions.
9. That a strong local offer should start with a robust population needs analysis and involve place-based system leadership to develop a multi-agency offer.
10. That local areas should have effective referral routes into parenting interventions from a range of local services.
11. That effective parenting support requires a skilled and integrated workforce to deliver effective interventions.
12. Parenting support should form part of a wider system of support that strengthens the resources available to parents.

Councils have been handed a guide to what works in supporting kinship families, according to the current evidence base.

They have been urged to offer carers specialist support in navigating services and financial allowances, to help support permanency and reduce placement disruption, along with providing parenting programmes to support the wellbeing of carers and children.

The practice guide, from what works body Foundations, is the first in a series of Department for Education-commissioned publications designed to provide councils with evidence-informed guidance on meeting the outcomes in the DfE’s children’s social care national framework (see box).

The kinship carer guide was based on a systematic review of the evidence of what works in improving outcomes for kinship carers and children in the UK and similar countries, and of what UK carers value in the support they receive.

‘Limited but growing evidence base’

The Centre for Evidence and Implementation (CEI), which conducted the review, found that the evidence base around how best to support kinship carers was “limited but continuing to grow”.

Photo: Fotolia/aquarious83men

The research was strongest in relation to so-called kinship navigator programmes, which provide carers with specialist practitioners and information to help them access the support to which they and the children they care for are entitled. These are widespread in the US but have not been formally introduced in the UK, though the Kinship Connected programme, run by the charity Kinship, is similar, said the CEI.

The US studies analysed suggested that navigator programmes had small but significant impacts on the likelihood of children being placed in kinship care where a decision was made to remove them from the family home, and also on reducing the likelihood of placement disruption thereafter.

There was also some evidence, from two studies, of navigator programmes helping children to move into permanency, whether through reunification with their parents, adoption or guardianship.

Evidence for navigator programmes improving child safety and carers’ wellbeing, parenting skills and knowledge of services was more limited.

Navigator programmes ‘should be rolled out in UK’

The CEI concluded that the navigator programmes approach “holds promise” and should be rolled out and evaluated in the UK.

Based on this, Foundations’ practice guide says councils should “offer kinship carers specialist support to learn about, navigate and access the support that they are entitled to”, on the basis there was “good evidence” that this worked.

The CEI also found a small but statistically significant impact on permanence from providing financial subsidies to kinship carers who take on guardianship for children, based on five papers across three US studies.

However, it said the small number of studies meant this finding should be interpreted with caution, stressed the different context for permanence in the UK, compared with the US, and argued that more evidence was needed to examine stability and child wellbeing outcomes, along with legal permanency.

Call for councils to offer financial allowances

Based on this, the practice guide says there is “promising evidence” for councils to offer a financial allowance to kinship carers “to increase placement permanency, reduce the likelihood of placement disruption and improve the likelihood of permanent guardianship”.

Photo: Gourmet Photography/Fotolia

Currently, in England, the only kinship carers entitled to a financial allowance are family and friends foster carers. Those caring for a child under a special guardianship order (SGO) or child arrangements order (CAO) may receive a means-tested payment, though this is discretionary, while no specific provision from children’s services exists for informal kinship carers.

In its kinship care strategy, published in December 2023, the previous Conservative government announced it would pilot providing special guardians of former looked-after children with allowances equivalent to those received by foster carers, in eight areas from 2024-28, backed by £16m in 2024-25. The Labour government is yet to confirm whether it will take this forward.

Impact of parenting programmes

The systematic review also found positive impacts from parenting programmes for kinship carers on their wellbeing and that of the children they were caring for, along with on the children’s behaviour. However, the CEI urged caution based on the fact these findings were based on small sample sizes, while it found no evidence of impact on carers’ parenting and their relationships with children.

The CEI called for more “rigorous evaluations to be able to understand the efficacy of these programmes and other approaches for kinship carers and the children in their care, especially within the UK”.

In the light of this, Foundations recommends that councils offer parenting support to kinship carers when a child or young person is demonstrating behaviours that challenge their carer on a frequent basis, based on “promising evidence”.

Providing CBT, peer support groups and self-care training

The practice guide makes three further recommendations for authorities, also based on promising evidence.

Picture posed by models: Photo: Nullplus/Fotolia

It says authorities should make cognitive behavioural therapy available to kinship carers assessed as in need of therapeutic support due to, for example, the child displaying behaviours that challenge the carer, in order to reduce these behaviours.

This was based on a single study, which found a positive impact of CBT for carers on children’s behaviours. While this had a “fairly large” sample and low risk of bias, the CEI said further research was needed to replicate the finding.

The practice guide also calls for councils to provide cares with access to peer support in order to improve their wellbeing. The two relevant papers in the systematic review suggested a positive impact on carer wellbeing, but one had some concerns for risk of bias and used a fairly small sample and the other did not report effect sizes, said the CEI.

The practice guide also recommends offering kinship carers training in self-care to support their emotional health and wellbeing. This was based on three papers, for which the CEI found “some evidence of
promise”. However, it did not report high confidence in the findings because the strength and significance of the results varied significantly across the studies.

What kinship carers want in their support

The systematic review also looked at UK carers’ perspectives on the support they needed. While it said there was a limited research base for this in the UK, it found the messages for practice were clear and distilled  them into 10 statements, five of which it had “high confidence” in:

1. An intervention’s distinction from statutory services is perceived to facilitate engagement, favourable experiences and positive outcomes. The CEI found kinship carers felt more positively about support from non-statutory services due to prior negative experiences with statutory provision, including “a closed-door approach” and “sporadic and unreliable” from social workers.
2. Providing carers with access to a network of peers enhances an intervention’s acceptability and usefulness. Carers reported finding solace, understanding and practical support within these groups.
3. Carers value specialised support due to their unmet needs and the gaps in statutory services. Carers reported that social care and other services frequently underestimated the severity of their needs, lacked appropriate services to address them, or imposed eligibility criteria that families found challenging to meet. They expressed a strong preference for interventions tailored specifically to address the unique challenges faced by kinship families.
4. Carers value recipient-centred programmes. The studies found that carers appreciated support that was collaboratively designed, tailored and flexible.
5. Targeted interventions for kinship families were perceived as beneficial by both carers and practitioners. They reported that this benefited carers’ wellbeing and parenting skills.

Good practice principles

Based on the statements, Foundations’ practice guide sets out three key principles for working with kinship families:

• Support for kinship carers should take into account the specific needs and strengths of kinship carers.
• One-to-one relationships and high-quality casework should be at the heart of support for kinship families.
• Kinship families need to be made aware of the support they are entitled to, and local authorities should actively work to address barriers to accessing support.

Implementing the guidance

Alongside the practice guide, Foundations published a reflective tool, to help local authorities implement it. This advises councils to assess their current level of provision for kinship families, identify gaps and support and make plans to fill these, act on these plans and then review the impact.

In a blog post, the DfE’s chief social worker for children and families, Isabelle Trowler, said that Foundations would be working with a small number of local authorities to embed the guide’s recommendations and generate learning that can be shared more widely.

The guide also follows last week’s publication by the DfE of statutory guidance for councils on kinship care, which is an update of 2011 guidance on family and friends care.

The statutory guidance calls on councils to provide kinship families with a “local offer”, which “should be based on evidence of what works”, drawing on the practice guide.

Financial offer to carers

The local offer should set out the eligibility criteria for financial carers, the process for applying for this and circumstances in which means-testing will apply, while councils should draw up written agreements setting out the level and duration of any support given.

In response to this, Association of Directors of Children’s Services president Andy Smith said: “The guidance provides for each local area to design its own financial support offer. ADCS has advocated for these payments to be made via the benefits system to reduce our involvement in family life where there are no ongoing concerns or needs.”

National ambassador role

The publication of the practice guide and updated statutory guidance also follows the appointment of adultification bias expert Jahnine Davis as England’s first national kinship care ambassador.

National kinship care ambassador Jahnine Davis

One of her roles is to support and challenge councils to improve practice, which Trowler highlighted in her blog post about the new practice guide.

Four in ten family support and early help workers have personal experience of domestic abuse, a survey has found.

The proportion of those who reported personal experience of domestic abuse (39.1%) compares with a prevalence rate for women aged over 16 across England and Wales of 27% as of 2023, according to Office for National Statistics (ONS) data.

Women accounted for 90.9% of the 350 practitioners, across 11 local authorities, surveyed online as part of a scoping study into early help and family support staff’s domestic abuse knowledge and skills.

The study, commissioned by children’s services evidence body Foundations, found that personal experience had helped some staff understand the impact of domestic abuse on those they supported.

However, it also underlined the importance of providing wellbeing services, including counselling and reflective supervision, for practitioners, said the report, produced by social work academics from the University of Central Lancashire and King’s College London.

DfE plans to expand role of early help staff

Foundations commissioned the research in the light of the Department for Education’s children’s social care reforms, which envisage an expanded role for early help staff in supporting families in significant need, including domestic abuse.

Under the plans, currently being tested, existing targeted early help and child in need provision will be merged into a new family help service, designed to provide early, non-stigmatising support that prevents families’ needs from escalating.

At the same time, early help and family support practitioners – and other non-social workers – will be able to take responsibility for child in need cases, with social work supervision, under revisions to the Working Together to Safeguard Children guidance.

Concerns over knowledge and skills

However, inspectorates including Ofsted have raised concerns about some early help staff already receiving overly complex cases.

At the same time, the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel has detected a “simplistic and over-optimistic” approach to domestic abuse within children’s services, generally.

As well as the online survey, the Foundations-commissioned study was based on:

• Staff feedback on an online training module they were invited to complete alongside the survey.
• Case studies in five of the authorities, involving interviews with practitioners and managers and analysis of strategic documents.
• Interviews with four domestic abuse training providers.
• A review of policy documents in England and Wales.

Positive impact of domestic abuse training 

Most survey respondents (84.3%) had worked on at least one domestic abuse case in the past six months and a similar proportion (85.1%) of staff had received domestic abuse training.

Overall, two-thirds (67.9%) of respondents said they had had sufficient training to assist victims, with the rest not confident or unsure.

And while most staff expressed confidence in relation to key practice tasks and skills in domestic abuse, levels of confidence were related to whether they had received training.

For example, while 65% of those who had not received training felt confident they could make appropriate and sensitive referrals for those who had experienced domestic abuse, this was true of 88% who had received training.

Recognising indicators of abuse

This gap was also evident in relation to recognising possible indicators of domestic abuse, self-reported knowledge and attitudes.

Staff who had received training were significantly more likely than those who had not to always/nearly always enquire about domestic abuse in response to mental health, physical health, parental conflict or school attendance problems.

Having had training was also associated with better self-reported knowledge on all of a list of 18 areas.

Domestic abuse knowledge and attitudes

Overall, respondents were most likely to say they knew quite a bit or a lot about the impact on children and young people (83.1%), signs and symptoms (80.3%) and their role in relation to domestic abuse (78%).

Knowledge was lowest in relation to national guidance, for example on the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, where 28% reported knowing quite a bit or a lot, followed by responding to perpetrators (37.6%).

In relation to attitudes, while 31.3% of staff believed that ‘women abuse men as much as men abuse women’, this belief was significantly more common among untrained staff.

Feedback from staff who completed the training module after the survey identified improvements in self-reported knowledge compared with their levels beforehand.

Impact of experience on domestic abuse skills

Alongside training, those who had worked for their employer for longer were more likely to express confidence in their skills and self-reported knowledge of domestic abuse. Over half (57.4%) had worked for their current employer for more than five years.

Case study local authorities provided early help and family support staff with a range of external and in-house training – the latter being more generic – but acknowledged that provision was constrained by budgets.

Practitioners identified knowledge and training gaps in relation to working with disabled children, families from diverse communities and LGBTQ+ families.

And though much early help and family support work in the case study areas involved domestic abuse, practitioners had limited experience of working with perpetrators, who tended to be referred to specialist staff.

Case study authorities provided staff with support to deal with the challenging aspects of domestic abuse work, including reflective and clinical supervision, debriefing, group sessions and access to counselling.

Improved domestic abuse training urged

The report set out a number of implications for policy and practice from the research, including that:

• Training on domestic abuse, from induction to advanced level, should be embedded in councils’ early help and family support workforce development strategies.
• Authorities leverage the skills and knowledge of domestic abuse specialists in supporting their early help and family support staff.
• Councils build early help and family support staff’s confidence and skills in working with perpetrators and supporting children affected by domestic abuse, including disabled children.
• Training represents the experiences of diverse communities in relation to domestic abuse.
• Authorities support the wellbeing of their workforces through clinical and reflective supervision and access to counselling.

Support is available 24/7 from Refuge’s freephone national domestic abuse helpline (0808 2000 247).

Significant disparities in access to support for kinship carers have been laid bare in a survey of councils, whose results were published last week.

The availability of support differed by locality, whether the child had previously been in care or not and by the type of kinship arrangement or legal order they were cared for under, showed the study by evidence body Foundations, released to coincide with Kinship Care Week.

The findings come with a separate survey of almost 1,700 kinship carers, also published last week, having found that one in five never received any local authority support, while 44% of those who did rated it as ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’.

One in eight of those surveyed for charity Kinship’s Breaking Point report said they were concerned they may have to give up caring for their kinship child in the next year if their situation did not improve.

The Foundations study, based on survey responses from 80 councils (52% of the total), interviews with staff from 35 of these and round table discussions with 31 kinship carers, examined how far authorities provided support to the different types of kinship carer.

Hierarchy of support

Overall, it found that authorities were most likely to support to family and friends foster carers, followed by carers with a special guardianship order (SGO) for the child and then those with a child arrangements order or residence order (CAO/RO) giving them parental responsibility.

For those with an SGO or CAO/RO, support was greater when the child had previously been looked after.

Family and friends foster carers are entitled to the national minimum fostering allowance.

Differences in financial support and training offer

However, while 89% of councils provided an ongoing financial allowance to special guardians of children previously looked after, 63% did so where the child was not previously looked after. For carers with a CAO/RO, 69% provided ongoing financial support where the child was previously looked after, with 34% of authorities doing so where the child had not been in care.

Councils were also much more likely to offer special guardians of children previously looked after the equivalent of the national minimum foster care allowance than other groups of kinship carer, so long as there were no exceptional circumstances. However, most authorities that did so subtracted child benefit from the allowance.

There was a similar hierarchy in the provision of training to kinship carers. In relation to ongoing training, Foundations found that:

• 98% of councils provided this to family and friends foster carers.
• 78% did so for carers with an SGO for a previously looked-after child.
• 60% did so for special guardians of children not previously looked after.
• 38% provided it for carers with a CAO/RO for a previously looked-after child.
• 28% did so for carers with a CAO/RO for children not previously looked after.

And while almost all councils (93%) offered emotional or therapeutic support to family and friends foster carers, this fell to 86% for special guardians of previously looked-after children and 59% for special guardians of children not previously in care. For carers with a CAO/RO, 46% of councils offered this support where the child had previously been looked after and 30% did so when the child was not previously in care.

‘Need to end postcode lottery’

Foundations also asked councils about provision for informal kinship carers, who do not hold parental responsibility and are frequently unknown to councils despite. Half of respondents (51%) said there were no activities to identify these carers, while a further 30% were unsure about whether there were any such activities.

Foundations said that “the level of disparity in support across different kinship care arrangements does not reflect a differing level of responsibility required from carers”, and that there was a need to end the “postcode lottery” in support between areas.

It was not able to identify what types of support for kinship carers were most effective.

In order to do so, the evidence body has commissioned a systematic review of policies, programmes and interventions designed to improve outcomes for kinship carers and children in their care.

This will interrogate what interventions work in improving outcomes such as permanence, child wellbeing and carer-child relationships, common success factors and enablers and barriers to their  implementation.

DfE to produce kinship strategy

Meanwhile, the Department for Education is planning to produce a kinship strategy before the end of the year, which will include an update on its promise to explore the case for introducing a financial allowance for kinship carers with SGOs and CAOs.

As part of its children’s social care reform strategy, Stable Homes, Built on Love, the DfE has also promised to introduce a national kinship training, information and advice service by spring
2024, backed by £9m in funding over the subsequent year.

Kinship, which contributed to the Foundations study, said: “Every day, we hear from kinship carers who are fighting to get help from their local authority and navigating a complex landscape of support based not on their family’s needs but on legal order and where they live. Currently, too many kinship families are being pushed into arrangements which don’t come with a right to the support they and their children need to thrive.”

‘Risk of arrangements breaking down’

The charity warned that its Breaking Point report suggested that 19,000 children were at risk of entering the care system because of a breakdown of kinship care arrangements.

“This isn’t inevitable, but it demands action, leadership and funding from government. The forthcoming kinship care strategy must clarify how kinship care fits into the wider children’s social care system.

The Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) said the use of kinship care arrangements was increasing and that variations between councils would be linked to local priorities, resources and need.

“The continuation of existing relationships with extended family members or friends can help children navigate their early childhood experiences, but there is a lack of understanding about the nature and status of kinship carers and some variation in how these arrangements are delivered,” said Nigel Minns, chair of the ADCS’s health, care and additional needs policy committee.

“The government has committed to publish a kinship strategy which, if successful, has the potential to change the way we work with a significant proportion of our children for the better.”

Good practice in family group conferencing must not be diluted as the intervention gets rolled out across children’s social care services.

That was the warning from experts at an event this week to mark the publication of a study that found rolling out FGCs to families at the pre-proceedings stage could prevent 2,000 children going into care each year, saving over £150m a year.

FGCs are facilitated, family-led meetings of relatives, friends and professionals involved with a child at risk that are designed to produce a plan to keep the child safe within the family.

Children’s social care reforms

Alongside the research, commissioned by evidence body Foundations in June, the Department for Education has proposed revising the Working Together to Safeguard Children guidance to encourage use of FGCs from early help onwards where there is a risk of the child going into care.

And it will test the impact of using family group decision making – a more general concept than FGCs – at an early stage of a child’s involvement with social care as part of its children’s social care reform programme.

This will be through the up to 12 families first for children pathfinders, which will test the DfE’s proposed new model of family help and child protection, and the separate family network pilots taking place in seven local authorities.

Children’s minister David Johnston

New children’s minister

Addressing this week’s meeting, organised by Foundations, recently-appointed children’s minister David Johnston said FGCs were a key plank of the government’s ambition to reduce the number of children going into care.

“I think family group conferencing is so important and the evaluation confirms that,” he said. “It is reducing by significant proportion the number of people going into care. [The cost savings] are not my primary concern. My primary concern is that in preventing them going into care they will have beter outcomes as young people.”

Isabelle Trowler, the chief social worker for children and families

Following Johnston, the DfE’s chief social worker for children and families, Isabelle Trowler, said the Foundations-commissioned study was groundbreaking in so far as it used a randomised controlled trial (RCT) to test the impact of FGCs.

RCTs are considered the gold standard method for testing the impact of an intervention and involve comparing outcomes between a group receiving the intervention and an otherwise similar control group that does not.

‘Step-change in quality of social care evidence’

Referring to the study’s importance in harnessing wider government support for FGCs, Trowler said: “Nothing makes the Treasury sit up like an RCT. It gives confidence to the politician and the purse holders, but, critically, to local practice leaders.”

She added: “In the past 10 years, we have had a step-change in the quality of evidence coming into our work and that’s holding us in much better stead for decisions about funding.”

Though family group conferences, which originate among Māori communities in New Zealand, were introduced to England in the 1990s, their coverage remains patchy, said Foundations chief executive Jo Casebourne.

Charity the Family Rights Group has long promoted the use of FGCs, including through a dedicated network, and runs an accreditation scheme setting good practice standards for carrying them out.

Need to stick to FGC model

Speaking at this week’s meeting, Gloucestershire County Council’s FGC manager, Alex Ryan, advised fellow authorities to join the Family Rights Group network and stick to its standards.

“It’s not the Family Rights Group model, the Māori in New Zealand created that,” she said. “It came for a reason, because their children were being disproportionately taken into care.

“The need to stick to the model is for values-based reasons – it’s about going from being professionals are the experts to the families being the experts…This makes sure that family voice, their wisdom and experience stays at the centre of the discussion.”

Ryan particularly highlighted the importance of families having private time – without any professionals present – to develop their plan, adding: “The FGC model needs to be the FGC model because it has that private family time where they are not being pressured to do one thing or another. If we say we’re going to take them somewhere that is led by them, we cannot impose our agenda.”

Importance of private time for families

Her point was echoed by Family Rights Group chief executive Cathy Ashley, who raised concerns about the DfE’s use of the term, ‘family group decision making’, as the approach it wanted to test through its children’s social care reforms.

“The problem of using family group decision making is that you get a variety of interpretations – it doesn’t involve private time [for families] or giving families time for reflection,” she added.

Casebourne added that “too often, families are receiving a rushed FGC that does not meet Family Rights Group standards”.

In response, Trowler acknowledged the importance of FGC co-ordinators being independent, adding: “The big thing for me is what do we mean by independence and what does this mean for the family who is the subject of the conference. Whatever it is, the family needs to feel that that facilitator is neutral.”

Tim Aldridge

Meanwhile, Camden council director of children’s services Tim Aldridge said that FGCs should be seen as one element in making the whole children’s social care system more collaborative with families.

“There’s the scope for the whole system to be more collaborative and think about how it shares power with families,” he added. “We shouldn’t see family group conferences as a standalone but as part of a broader way of working with families.”

Children whose parents are referred to family drug and alcohol courts (FDACs) are more likely to be reunified with their families than those involved in standard care proceedings, research has found.

Parents involved in FDACs are also more likely to have stopped using drugs or alcohol by the end of their cases than those in standard proceedings.

But study limitations mean these positive effects cannot be attributed entirely to FDACs, so further research is needed to evaluate whether the courts cause improved outcomes, said evidence body Foundations (formerly What Works for Children’s Social Care).

It commissioned National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) to carry out the study, as part of the Department for Education’s (DfE) Supporting Families: Investing in Practice programme, which is designed to identify effective interventions for keeping families together.

Promising evidence for FDACs

The research was designed to build on promising existing evidence about the impact of FDACs, an alternative to standard care proceedings in substance misuse cases, geared towards keeping children with their families, where possible.

Under the model, multidisciplinary teams work with parents to help them tackle their alcohol or drug misuse, including through key worker support, individual or group therapy and referral to other services.

At the same time, specially trained judges undertake fortnightly sessions with parents – in the absence of lawyers – to oversee progress and foster positive working relationships between families, the judiciary and FDAC practitioners.

Since first being piloted in London from 2008-12, the number of FDAC teams has grown to 15, covering 36 local authority areas in England and Wales.

Randomised controlled trial model rejected

This study was originally designed to be a randomised controlled trial (RCT), which would have involved families being randomly assigned to an intervention group receiving an FDAC and a control group who did not, with the two groups having similar characteristics overall.

However, while this would have helped identify whether FDACs caused improved outcomes, an RCT was rejected on the grounds of legal obstacles, such as families in the control group appealing the outcome of the case or the assignment process.

Instead, researchers chose a model – known as a quasi-experimental design (QED) – in which families referred to FDACs in 13 areas were compared with families involved in standard care proceedings, where parental substance misuse was the key issue, in nine local authorities.

All but one of the latter councils were covered by FDAC sites and researchers sought to ensure that families in the two groups had broadly similar characteristics, in the data they analysed.

Better outcomes from FDACs

On the two key outcomes analysed, the study found that:

• Over half of children with a primary carer in FDAC care proceedings (52%) were reunified with this carer at the end of proceedings; the figure for children in the comparison group was one in eight (12.5%).
• A third of FDAC parents had stopped misusing drugs or alcohol by the end of the case (33.6%) compared with 8.1% of parents in the comparison group.

Interviews with 40 practitioners and parents involved with FDACs also highlighted three key perceived benefits with them compared with standard care proceedings:

• They were a more supportive process for parents, allowing them to demonstrate their ability to meet their child’s needs, rather than feeling punitive.
• They led to better outcomes including reductions in substance use, higher rates of reunification, increased insight and parenting skills and lower rates of contested cases.
• They achieved long-term cost savings despite the upfront investment required to provide intensive support and supervision to parents.

Study caveats

However, the study report warned that the positive results needed to be treated with caution because there was a high risk that the differences in outcomes were being driven by differences between the FDAC families and those in the comparison group.

Researchers lacked data on key characteristics that may have influenced outcomes – such as parents’ mental health diagnoses, the severity of their substance use and their motivations to stop misuse.

And, in their final analysis, the study team had to exclude a number of families in order to match the FDAC and control group samples as far as possible, which the report said “limited the generalisability of [the findings]”.

Foundations chief executive Jo Casebourne said this meant “unable to draw firm conclusions about the impact of FDAC based on this study” and that a “more robust comparison” was required, involving either a randomised controlled trial or a quasi-experimental design with better data.

Findings ‘a testament to practitioners’ hard work’

Despite the caveats, the research was welcomed by the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) and the Centre for Justice Innovation, which provides national leadership and support for FDACs.

Its director, Phil Bowen, said the findings were “a testament to the hard work and diligence of the judges and professionals” within FDACs across England and Wales.

“These positive findings build on a strong evidence base, reinforcing the message that if we expand the number of FDACs across the country, we will improve the life chances of hundreds of children and parents across our country.”

ADCS president John Pearce said FDACs were an example of the value of problem-solving approaches in helping keep children with their families, where this was in their best interests.

However, he said that “the piecemeal nature of new funding has meant the benefits have been limited to a small number of local authorities”.

“ADCS would welcome a shift in approach so that all local authorities were resourced to explore new ways of working and where there is evidence of what works, all were resourced to implement such models,” Pearce added.

David Westlake’s July 2023 article for Community Care argued for more randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in social work research and the merits of the recently published RCT on family group conferences (FGC RCT).

As one of the academics who opposed the FGC RCT – commissioned by What Works for Children’s Social Care (now Foundations) and designed and carried out by Coram – I want to explore some of the concerns I, and others, hold about its conduct.

Academics’ opposition to the FGC RCT was not an absolute objection to the use of RCTs in social work research.

RCTs may be largely uncontroversial in some contexts and the ethical issues involved in one which, say, evaluates a training course are different to those concerning a trial that denies a family an FGC when their children are on the edge of care.

They need to be explored on a case-by-case basis.

Objections to randomly allocating families a service

Our objections to the FGC RCT centred on the point at which, and the manner in which, families were randomised into an ‘intervention group’ offered an FGC and a ‘control group’ who were not.

The randomisation occurred when families were referred to pre-proceedings under the Public Law Outline (PLO), meaning there was a good chance the local authority would subsequently apply to court to place their children outside of parental care.

The randomisation also occurred without families’ knowledge and consent.

Those in the ‘control group’ were denied the chance of choosing an FGC at this critical moment in their family’s life and were not routinely informed that other families in similar situations in their local authority were being offered an FGC.

Other viable research designs available

There were other viable research designs for the study, instead of randomisation.

These included comparing data for families before or after the FGC service was set up, and during the period when the service was running; or, comparing data between families who chose to have an FGC and those who did not.

Crucially, these alternatives would have preserved families’ ability to choose an FGC when that service was available within their local authority. It would also have meant evaluators could be transparent with families about the study’s design.

Study design ‘contrary to social work principles’

The way this RCT was undertaken conflicted with the International Federation of Social Workers’ Global Social Work Statement of Ethical Principles.

This stipulates that social workers should support the self-determination, and the participation, of those with whom they work, wherever possible.

It also conflicted with Social Work England’s professional standards, which state that social workers should:

• respect and promote the human rights, views, wishes and feelings of the people they work with, balancing rights and risks and enabling access to advice, advocacy, support and services (standard 1.2); and
• work in partnership with people to promote their well-being and achieve best outcomes, recognising them as experts in their own lives (1.3).

Some researchers may argue they are not bound by social work ethical codes.

However, it is not obvious why it should be acceptable for researchers to design a study of families receiving a social work service in a way that would be considered unethical if applied in everyday social work practice.

Doing to – not with – families

Notably, the FGC RCT study protocol stated that if a court decreed that a family in the ‘control group’ should receive an FGC, then the local authority should respect this judgment and offer one.

The study’s randomisation process could therefore be broken on the say of a judge, but not at the direct request of the family whose lives were involved. Far from ‘nothing about us without us’, this was ‘everything about you without you’.

Foundations has failed to recognise the irony in it proclaiming the FGC RCT as a ‘landmark study’, which provides validation of the value of ‘working with families’, when the study itself ‘did to’ families.

Why should such a disjuncture between the methods used to research families, and the methods advocated for practising with them be deemed acceptable? The ethical concerns I describe mean that for some of us, the study will continue to constitute a low mark, not a landmark.

Robin Sen is a lecturer in social work at the University of Edinburgh and co-editor of a recent book collection, The Future of Children’s Care, Critical Perspectives on Children’s Services Reform

By David Westlake, Cardiff University

Two of the largest randomised controlled trials (RCTs) ever conducted in social work have been published recently by Foundations*.

Last month, Sarah Taylor and her team from Coram reported that children whose families were referred for family group conferences (FGCs) were significantly less likely to be in care 12 months after entering pre-proceedings than those whose families were not so referred.

Earlier this year, my colleagues and I found that a scheme placing social workers in schools did not make any difference to the child protection and care outcomes we assessed, such as the likelihood of a section 47 investigation.

Policy impact of research

Whereas policymakers are not investing in social workers in schools, there is now a stronger case for rolling out FGCs for families in pre-proceedings.

If nothing else, these studies put to bed the idea that RCTs are practically, financially, or ethically impossible in children’s services.

Both these studies weathered the storm of the pandemic, stuck closely to their original plans and collected enough data to present strong conclusions. Neither cost more than one would anticipate for studies of their size, and both were well within the standard rule of thumb for evaluation costing (5-10% of the budget for the intervention).

Ethical objections to randomised controlled trial

Photo: tumsasedgars/Adobe Stock

In relation to ethics, some academics opposed the FGC project’s design, raising  objections that have been mounted throughout the history of social work RCTs.

The central critique against randomising families to receive either an FGC or a normal case conference was that proponents believed families had a right to an FGC.

Realising that right was an end in itself, and withholding it from some families through randomisation, in order to test effectiveness, was wrong.

The study has received a broadly positive reception since its findings were published, and it is now likely FGCs will be offered to more families than ever before in a wider roll-out.

That said, some commentators are still concerned about the idea of basing access to this service on the grounds of efficacy and cost-effectiveness rather than rights.

I’d like to think part of the reason for the generally positive reception is that Taylor and colleagues showed it is possible to conduct such a trial ethically. The study meant more families, not fewer, had access to an FGC as a result of the project, and many spoke to the researchers about their views and experiences.

Indeed, both these recent RCTs used qualitative methods to give a rounded picture not just of whether it was a success but also how and why. Those who participated in interviews and focus groups would not have had the same opportunity to give their views and shape our understanding of the interventions had the studies not taken place.

Of course, evidence about how effective something is should never be the only thing that determines whether or not we do it.

The inclusion of qualitative and theory-based analysis is important because some interventions – such as problem solving courts, and indeed FGCs – are as much about being procedurally fair as they are about outcomes.

Need to test outcomes

Photo: Artur/Adobe Stock

But even these approaches make claims about outcomes that we should test.

Sometimes these claims are extraordinary – such as the suggestion of effect sizes for FGCs that are several times greater than what Taylor and colleagues found.

Their RCT gives us more precision about effects that can be weighed up against any moral justifications for using that approach.

And, if – contrary to expectations – these interventions are detrimental, or detrimental to some groups, then that also needs to be part of the equation.

Earlier research on FGCs, for instance, found some (albeit limited) evidence that minoritised groups may have worse outcomes as a result of the intervention.

Even the strongest proponents of FGCs would surely accept that a large enough effect in that direction would make it unjustifiable. And without studies like the recent trial, we would be blind to it.

Rights versus outcomes ‘a false choice’

False choices between rights and outcomes create an unhelpful parody of what an RCT in social work can be.

Outcomes are complex but so are rights, especially when the rights of parents and those of children are in tension. On its own, a rights perspective is not usually enough of a basis for overhauling services.

Rather than relegating outcomes in the name of rights, we need a more balanced and well-informed appreciation of the evidence to make decisions about how to help children and families. RCTs like these can make a valuable contribution.

David Westlake is senior research fellow at the Cardiff University’s Children’s Social Care Research and Development Centre (CASCADE) 

*Formerly What Works for Children’s Social Care

Over 2,000 children per year in England could avoid care through the rollout of family group conferences (FGC), research has found.

Providing all families with an FGC before they enter care proceedings could also save over £150m a year, said evidence body Foundations*, after releasing findings of a study it commissioned into the impact of conferences.

Children whose families were referred for an FGC before care proceedings began were significantly less likely to be in care twelve months after entering pre-proceedings than those whose families were not so referred, found the study.

FGCs are facilitated, family-led meetings of relatives, friends and professionals involved with a child at risk that are designed to produce a plan to keep the child safe.

Largest trial of FGCs

The 21-month evaluation, carried out by the children’s charity Coram, was the first in the UK to use a randomised controlled trial (RCT) to test the impact of FGCs, and the largest such trial in the world, covering 2,548 children from 1,471 families across 21 councils.

The study ran from September 2020 to May 2022 and was funded through the Department for Education’s supporting families: investing in practice programme, which is designed to test promising interventions in children’s social care.

RCTs are considered the gold standard method for testing the impact of an intervention and involve comparing outcomes between a group receiving the intervention and an otherwise similar control group that does not.

The study evaluated the impact of FGCs at the pre-proceedings stage, when local authorities inform families that proceedings to take their children into care will follow unless they take specific steps to address assessed risks to children.

The 21 councils – none of whom were previously offering FGCs at pre-proceedings – randomly allocated half of families to receive an FGC (the intervention group), plus their usual services, and the other half just to receive usual services.

Fewer children entering care after FGC

The primary outcome studied was the care status of children 12 months after the relevant council issued the pre-proceedings letter, for which Coram’s research team had data for 643 children in the intervention group and 584 in the control group by the end of the study.

The two groups were similar aside from the fact that mothers in the control group were significantly more likely to have had a child taken into care previously.

Among those in the intervention group, 34.7% had gone into care within 12 months of the FGC, compared to 46.6% children in the control group. After researchers adjusted for the different care histories in the two groups, they calculated that 36.6% of those in the intervention group were in care after 12 months, compared with 44.8% of the control group.

This was a statistically significant difference which meant that those in the latter category were 1.24 times as likely to be looked after than their counterparts.

Children in the FGC group were also significantly less likely to face care proceedings, with 59% doing so 12 months after the pre-proceedings letter, compared with 72% in the control group, after adjustment for baseline differences.

Those whose families received an FGC were also likely to have spent significantly less time in care than those in the control six months after the pre-proceedings letter was issued, an average of 10 fewer days after adjustment.

However, this effect was not significant 12 months after the pre-proceedings letter, and there were no significant effects in relation to any of these three outcomes after 18 months. Researchers said this was likely to be because of the relatively low available sample size.

Savings from conferences

Based on the results, Foundations estimated that 2,293 fewer children would go into care in England annually were FGCs to be rolled out nationally at the pre-proceedings stage. In 2021-22, 31,010 children started to be looked after in England.

The study calculated that the FGCs delivered through the programme cost £5,242 per child per year, a figure inflated by the inclusion of set-up costs and the impact of Covid-19, which disrupted the delivery of conferences.

Nevertheless, this was more than outweighed by the calculated saving of £6,202, from the reduction in those going into care, meaning a net saving of £960 per child per year.

The study builds on previous evaluations showing promising evidence for FGCs, including of Leeds council’s family valued programme and charity Daybreak’s service for children on the edge of care, delivered in Southwark and Wiltshire.

Call for councils to adopt FGCs at pre-proceedings

However, neither of these studies involved an RCT, which Foundations said were “more able than other designs to attribute the differences they find to the programme or service evaluated”.

“Every effort must be made to enable vulnerable children to live safely within their family network before considering care proceedings,” said Foundations chief executive Dr Jo Casebourne.

“We now have evidence that family group conferences, which empower families and children, have a higher success rate of keeping families together than going straight to care proceedings does.

DfE statutory guidance on pre-proceedings states that councils should involve wider family members in decision making where there are child protection concerns, and consider referral to an FGC unless this would be a risk to the child.

However, this too often did not happen at all or took place too late in the process, when taking the child into care was becoming the only option, found the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care in its final report last year.

Casebourne, whose organisation is chaired by care review lead Josh MacAlister, added: “We encourage all local authorities throughout England to act on this high quality evidence that FGCs work to implement FGCs earlier.”

Children’s social care reform plans

However, Foundations stressed that the study only provided evidence for the use of FGCs at pre-proceedings, and recommended further evaluation of its potential impact at other – particularly earlier – stages.

The DfE plans to test the impact of family group decision making – a more general concept than FGCs – at an earlier stage of a child’s involvement with social care as part of its children’s social care reform programme.

This will primarily be through the up to 12 families first for children pathfinders, which will test its proposed new model of family help and child protection, starting later this year.

Following the Foundations report, the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) said it welcomed the wider use of family group decision making, with most councils already using it to some extent.

‘Mounting body of evidence’ for FGCs

However, families, communities and young people policy committee chair Helen Lincoln warned that it was “challenging doing so in the context of increasing demand and long-term funding pressures”.

Charity the Family Rights Group, which provides training and consultancy to councils on FGCs, said the Foundations report added to the “mounting body of evidence” that conferences enabled children to “live safely and thrive within their families”.

Chife executive Cathy Ashley added: “At a time when there is a record number of children in care, it is now beyond doubt that all families should be offered a family group conference before their child is taken into care. These findings confirm that government should adopt this approach nationwide rather than the limited system of pathfinders currently being pursued.”

*Foundations has been formed from the merger of What Works for Children’s Social Care and the Early Intervention Foundation