YEF National Survey - Shaping Support for Parents, Families and Children in Care (England)

Background

The Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) have commissioned Cordis Bright to conduct two complementary reviews, both aimed at strengthening the evidence base on how to better support children and families. 

The first review focuses on the provision of parenting and family therapy programmes by local authorities in England and Wales. Early evidence suggests that there is a lot of variability in which evidence-based programmes are operating in which local areas, and the level of impact that is achieved.

The second review examines the role of the care system in protecting children from involvement in violence, both as victims and those who offend. We know that children in care are disproportionately affected by violence and exploitation, and face significantly higher rates of youth justice involvement than their peers. However, there is limited up-to-date evidence on the factors and pathways within the care system that can reduce or exacerbate this risk.

Before recommending any further steps, YEF would like to build a more robust understanding of 

i)              the local landscape in relation to both the commissioning and delivery of parenting and family therapy programmes, and 

ii)             the practice, policy, and system-level responses that shape outcomes for children in care.

With this aim in mind, YEF has worked with Cordis Bright to develop this survey.

The survey asks you to provide information about which evidence-based parenting and family therapy programmes are delivered or commissioned by your local authority. It also includes a few questions about risk factors for violence, local strategies, system barriers, and gaps in support for children in care.

Through this survey, we are keen to establish a really detailed picture of local provision so would be grateful if you could encourage as many people as possible within your local authority to complete this survey. This includes Directors and Assistant Directors, service managers, commissioners and practitioners.

Your responses will enable us to develop a dashboard showing provision of parenting and family therapy programmes across England and Wales. We will make this available to give you the ability to (a) map which services are in operation across your local area; (b) identify gaps in data and provision; and (c) see what is being provided in other local areas.

Definitions to guide completion of the survey:

• Parenting programmes are structured interventions designed to support parents in building positive, caring relationships with their children and promoting positive behaviour in their child.
• Family therapy programmes are structured interventions designed to strengthen family relationships, support children’s engagement in education and training, and improve the safety, wellbeing, and stability of children and families. They often focus on the ‘whole world’ of the child, including their homes and families, schools and teachers, and neighbourhoods and friends.
• Evidence-based practice focuses on using the best available evidence from multiple sources, to inform how programmes are designed and delivered. It involves testing and learning from delivery to understand whether approaches that work in theory can be implemented successfully in practice.
• Programmes which prevent crime, violence and antisocial behaviour. We are focusing on those parenting and family therapy programmes with evidence of improving the behaviour of the child or other violence-related outcomes, as defined within the Foundations Toolkit. Programmes focusing exclusively on literacy, numeracy or early childhood development are not included.
• Children’s risk of involvement in violence refers to both victimisation (experiencing or being targeted by violence, including exploitation) and offending (engaging in or being accused of engaging in violent behaviours). 

Confidentiality
 

All survey responses will be treated confidentially and stored securely. Once the project is complete, the data will be deleted in line with our data protection policies.

In our public outputs (such as the mapping dashboard or a summary report), we will include programme-level information linked to named local authorities. However, we will not publish or share any names, job roles, or other details that could identify individual respondents.

Responses to open-text questions or questions about commissioning decisions, risk factors and enablers and barriers to supporting children will not be linked to individual local authorities. These will be analysed thematically and reported only at an aggregate-level.

Further information
 

If you have any questions about your involvement, or how your data will be stored and/or used, please get in touch with Cordis Bright via YEFnationalsurvey@cordisbright.co.uk.