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IMPACT: Improving how evidence is used in policy formulation requires a better understanding of organizational processes inside government departments, for example budget management. Government departments need to ensure that such processes simultaneously strengthen robustness in the evidence base, improve alignment of the evidence base with policy priorities and contribute to a more cost-effective use of the evidence budget. This requires a nuanced understanding of who should be accountable for managing which aspects of the evidence budget and how these different lines of accountability play out in terms of their ability to foster formal and informal relationships between the policy cadre and the evidence cadre. In an era of rapid global change and declining public sector resources, the authors' findings will help researchers and senior officials understand how government departments should manage their evidence budgets to improve evidence use. There is extensive research on how evidence is used to inform policy-making, but little is known about how officials in government departments use their budgets to gather and analyse the evidence they need. Using empirical evidence from one UK government department (Defra) the authors analysed how and why, over a decade, policy officials changed their approach to managing the budget for sourcing and interpreting evidence. They explored the rationales for the changes and the tensions over who should manage which parts of the evidence budget. The authors conclude by urging researchers to participate in a programme of cross-departmental learning about budget management for evidence use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In England, administrative data on children's needs are recorded following a social work assessment. These data are typically used to understand prevalence of individual risk factors and to inform processes, such as the work of local safeguarding partners and multi-agency services. However, reporting individual factors at assessment cannot capture the complexity and heterogeneity of multiple and overlapping needs. This study aimed to identify common types of demand, via a limited number of clusters, using the factors recorded in a national data-set of over 4.2 million assessments carried out between 2014 and 2021, of which 3.6 million had at least one factor recorded. Latent class analysis was used to identify twelve distinct categories of demand for children's social care services, which were consistent across local authorities. Conditional probabilities were used to interpret the demand represented by each category, in consultation with stakeholders. The most prevalent category was domestic abuse and violence (19.7 per cent), followed by complexities around parental mental health (18.4 per cent). Other categories included disability, child mental health, risks outside the home, complex domestic abuse and concerns about another person in the family or household. This article examines some of the operational and planning implications of categorising demand in this way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many evidence-based tools and measures exist to support child protection practice, in the United Kingdom, there is little evidence of their routine use in casework. This paper reports on a qualitative study exploring the use of such tools with children and families receiving statutory social care services. Fifteen social workers working in child safeguarding teams in two local authorities in Southeast England agreed to incorporate the use of outcome measures into their casework over a 6-month period. Qualitative data were collected through monthly action learning workshops held separately in each local authority. The results showed how the impact of using the measures was shaped by a combination of institutional factors, practice context and the dynamics of casework. Outcome measures were found to have benefits as well as limitations with respect to partnership working, assessment and decision-making and overall social work practice. Implications are discussed for the prospects of enhancing the use of evidence-based tools in statutory social work with children and families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted) is responsible for inspecting services that care for children and young people in England and Wales. This paper presents findings from an independent study of Ofsted inspections into children's social care in England, covering reports under three inspection frameworks during the period 2009 to 2016. The research aimed to identify the main themes of recommendations made in Ofsted reports and to explore similarities and differences between frameworks and between local authorities. The methodological approach was document analysis. A stratified sample of 60 reports was prepared on the basis of inspection framework and local authority characteristics such as local deprivation, Ofsted rating, and urban/rural category. A thematic analysis was conducted of the recommendations in each report, with emerging themes subjected to an iterative process of coding and categorization. The findings identified nine categories of themes, the most common of which were performance management, casework, oversight of practice, and multiagency working. Overall, the recommendations were strongly oriented towards process issues and compliance with standards. Recommendations were found to differ somewhat between inspection frameworks but remained largely consistent between local authorities with different characteristics. The paper concludes by examining the implications of findings for the current regulatory framework in children's social care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'This paper reports on findings from a qualitative study of practitioner–service user relationships in social work. The research aimed to identify social workers' personal constructs of their relationships with service users and explore how these constructs differed across roles and settings. A qualitative methodology employing a variation on role repertory grid techniques was used to carry out semi-structured interviews with social workers. Twenty-five social workers from seven different practice settings were interviewed and altogether identified over 200 personal constructs. The research team undertook a thematic analysis of these constructs along with their explanation and discussion in interview transcripts. The results identified twenty-five superordinate constructs within ten core themes, which reflected practitioners' experience of relationships, their systemic context, along with dynamics of power and collaboration. The constructs were often found to contrast a positive or preferred attribute of relationships with a more negative or challenging attribute, although the reality of relationships was often found to be complex and ambiguous. Some implications are explored for current theories of relationship-based practice in social work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores key conceptual frameworks for measurement in child-protection (CP) services and considers their application in the English statutory system. After introducing some of the debates surrounding the use of measures in CP, three different perspectives are considered: performance-based accountability, evidence-based approaches and socio-technical systems design. The paper outlines the main principles of each perspective and their implications for measurement, drawing on examples from the relevant literature. It is argued that the merits and drawbacks of different measures are dependent on the conceptual frameworks in which they are used, and these in turn reflect the contested nature of CP and its institutional context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]