Earlier this year, we published findings showing that family group conferences can keep children out of care, to instead live safely at home with their families.
A family group conference (FGC) is a family-led meeting in which the family and friends network comes together to make a plan for the child.
This might mean extra support for the parents to continue safely raising their child or identifying relatives or friends who can step in as the child’s kinship carer.
We found that more than 2,000 children a year could avoid going into the care system if FGCs were rolled out across England, with a saving of £150 million within two years.
Consequently, we’re recommending that FGCs are provided for all families before care proceedings begin.
Despite statutory guidance recommending the use of family group conferencing since 2014, too often FGCs are not provided or happen too late to divert children away from the care system, as highlighted in last year’s Independent Review of Children’s Social Care.
This is a landmark study: the evaluation, run by children’s charity Coram, was the first randomised control trial (RCT) of FGCs in the UK, and the largest in the world.
The strength of the RCT model of evaluation – where people are randomly assigned to programmes or service-as-usual – means that we can confidently say that it is family group conferencing that led to the improved outcomes we saw.
The results from this study provide the most robust evidence to date of the positive impact that FGCs have for children and families at the pre-proceedings stage.
Although RCTs are common in other fields, they are a relatively new approach to evaluation in children’s social care.
The successes of this trial and positive findings pave the way for future research of this kind, which will strengthen our knowledge about what works to improve children’s outcomes. Interventions and programmes that are widely used and promoted in policy should be evaluated for impact to ensure that they offer the best support for children and families.
Robust findings will enable us to make the case to local and national government for interventions that are most likely to make the most difference to improving children’s lives.
At Foundations, our mission is to generate and champion actionable evidence that improves services to support family relationships. We have a commitment to only say things work if they have evidence of impact.
When it comes to FGCs, there is still more work to be done to address evidence gaps on their effectiveness at different points in the children’s social care system, for example as part of targeted early help, or support provided for a child in need.
We will continue working in this area: strengthening family networks is one of our new strategy’s key priority areas.
But now we know that family group conferences are a cost-effective intervention that can keep children out of care, local authorities should introduce them at pre-proceedings stage, where they are not currently doing so.
We continued the conversation this month by bringing together key players in the sector to hear from Foundations, including: the Minister for Children, Families and Wellbeing; the Chief Social Worker for Children and Families; and an FGC lead. Let’s use these findings to follow the evidence!
- Foundations is the national and independent What Works Centre for Children & Families, visit www.foundations.org.uk