Evaluation by children’s charity Coram

More information for adult family members

Thank you for your interest in our evaluation.

We are running an evaluation project to find out what happens to families after they have been sent a letter by their local council. The letter states that the council will seek to take your child or children into care, by seeking a Care Order from a court, if you or others do not take specific actions.

About this document

You should have received an information sheet from your council telling you about the evaluation. This document goes into more detail on the evaluation. You can share and discuss it with other people like your solicitor.

Purpose of the evaluation

We want to know if the way your council works with you and your family affects the chances that your children live with family or friends, or go into care, in the months and years after the letter. We also want to know if their living arrangements change and how often, such as how often they might move between different family members, or go to live with foster carers or in a children’s home.

We will look at data from over 1,000 families in your position across England, to find out what happens to children over the months after you receive a ‘pre-proceedings’ letter like the one you have received. We aim that this project will help improve public services in future for all children and families, by providing more evidence to better inform decision making.

Evaluating different ways of working with families

At the point when your council decided to write to you with the letter you received, you were randomly placed into one of two groups of families. Half of families are in one group, and the other half in the other group. Your council will work with the two groups of families in different ways. We are interested in the difference made by the ways of working, if any, to the chances that your children live with family or friends, or go into care. One group are offered a ‘family group conference’ and the other group are not, but will still receive other support from the council. So you should know which group of families you are in.

We do not know if family group conferences are helpful or not, so we are working with councils to test them. We will follow up with councils to find out what happens afterwards to children whose families take part in family group conferences, and those who do not. This type of evaluation is known as a randomised controlled trial.

What you need to do

There is no need for you to do anything in order to be included in the project. If we do not hear from you, we will ask your council for data on your child or children until June 2022. This will let us see the short-term and long-term outcomes of different ways of working with families. The data will not

include your name or address. We do not need these details because we want to find out about what happens to children in general, not your family specifically. Information collected about your family will be confidential. When we write about what we find, we will not use anyone’s name or anything that would tell people who you or your family are.

We want to collect this data because councils have a duty to give families the information needed to enable them to take part in decisions, and to do this, they need evidence like this. If you do not want us to collect and analyse your family’s data for the project, you can email [email protected], phone 0207 520 8181 (you can leave a message outside working hours) or write to Impact & Evaluation Team, Coram, 41 Brunswick Square, London WC1N 1AZ. If you do this by 31 May 2022, your data will not be included in any later analysis or reports. If you opt out of us collecting and analysing your family’s data, it will make no difference to the service you receive from your council.

As well as this data collection, we will ask a small number of families if they are happy to speak to us in person or on the phone. We want to hear what families think about how their council works with them. We will explain more to these families when we contact them.

Ethical approval

This project has received ethical approval from Coram’s research ethics committee and from your council. This means they believe what we are suggesting will not be harmful to you, and that the findings will be useful to other families and local authorities in the future.

Background to the evaluation and evaluators

We are Coram, a children’s charity. The Impact and Evaluation team in Coram have been funded to carry out this work by What Works for Children’s Social Care, as part of the Department for Education programme, Supporting families: investing in practice. Councils applied to take part in the programme. We are working with your council to carry out the evaluation.

The councils taking part are: Bath and North East Somerset, Birmingham, Bromley, Derbyshire, Knowsley, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Lewisham, Middlesbrough, North East Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Nottingham City, Plymouth, Redcar and Cleveland, Rotherham, Salford, Sheffield, Shropshire, Southampton, Staffordshire, and Sunderland. The charity Daybreak is also involved in the programme.

How to find out more

If after reading this document you would still like more information about the evaluation, you can email [email protected], phone 0207 520 8181 (you can leave a message outside working hours) or write to Impact & Evaluation Team, Coram, 41 Brunswick Square, London WC1N 1AZ.

You can also get in touch if you would like to be added to a list to receive a copy of our findings, when they are published in 2022.

2