This opinion article was written by Michael Sanders, Executive Director of the research institute What Works for Children’s Social Care, which is funded by the British government to help build evidence in particular areas of public policy, as part of the What Works Network****. For more like this, see our education newsfeed.

Young people’s lives are important. It’s cliché to say that children are the future, but it is nonetheless true.

Safeguarding those young lives, and giving them the best chance to thrive, is therefore among the most important roles a person can play, and social work is one of the most important and valuable jobs in our society.

Each day, the decisions and actions of the tens of thousands of social workers and other professionals and practitioners in the UK working with young people make a difference to the lives of young people and their families.

As researchers, we may be less involved in the lives of young people than these practitioners, but our responsibility is still clear — to make use of the widest possible range of tools and methods to ensure that our research can support practitioners in their vital work.

One policy, many approaches

At What Works for Children’s Social Care, we’re pleased to now be working with nearly 100 local authorities in England on a range of research projects ranging from exploratory research, to data analysis, to small scale pilots and large scale randomised controlled trials. These collaborations take a number of forms.

With 24 authorities, we’re partnering with the Department for Education to fund the roll out and evaluation of family group conferences — an idea that’s popular around the sector.

Meanwhile in Bolton we’ve funded a trial of providing additional supervision to designated safeguarding leads in schools — an idea that the local Principal Social Worker came up with and pitched to us. In every case, we’re trying to answer questions that are relevant to everyday practice, and working with local partners to make sure that our research does this.

Although we’re just getting started, we’re trying to build a pipeline of research that helps to carry ideas and elements of practice through from conception, to proof of concept, all the way to proof of impact.

Most of what some call “innovation” is in fact just a consequence of professionals doing their job, day after day, and someone thinking of a new, different, and perhaps better way to approach this

As practitioners, leaders, academics and policymakers come up with new ideas, models and innovations, we are constantly testing new approaches. Jumping to a large scale, potentially expensive randomised controlled trial before an intervention is well understood runs the risk that the intervention isn’t ready – refined and developed enough – to be tested properly. This could then lead us to erroneously conclude that it doesn’t work, or could ossify a version of the idea which is not as mature – and effective – as it could be.

An example of this can be found in our projects placing social workers in schools. The idea is simple enough – the five words pretty much sum it up. As some people commented when we released our interim findings in August, it’s not even a new idea – it’s been tried before in several local authorities. However, when we get into the details, what sounds like one idea — placing social workers in schools —  is actually three different ideas, in the three authorities we’re working with.

How many social workers, sitting together or apart, in how many schools, of what type, supporting how many other schools, doing what? Any combination of answers to these questions might be legitimate and sensible, but will invariably lead to different results. Working out which elements show the most promise is exactly the point of our current pilot research.

How to be evidence-based

Most of what some call “innovation” is in fact just a consequence of professionals doing their job, day after day, and someone thinking of a new, different, and perhaps better way to approach this.

When this happens, most ideas don’t get further than a single team or a single local authority. Building an evidence base around them is difficult. Our Practice in Need of Evidence programme (PINE), works with local authorities and other organisations, 9 in total for this first wave of interventions, to help them build that evidence: taking them along the pipeline from formalising and describing what they’re doing, to understanding how children, families, social workers and other professionals feel about it, and how they engage with it, through to producing low cost, and indicative evidence of impact.

Recommendations for “how to be evidence-based”:

  • Be clear what you mean by evidence – and, when someone is telling you something is based on evidence, ask what they mean
  • Be honest with yourself – where on the evidence pathway does your idea currently sit, and what evidence do you need to move forward?
  • Actively pursue opportunities to build evidence around what you do, both internally and through collaboration.

Through this we’re hoping to help local authorities and social care professionals to become more evidence minded in general, as well as building the evidence around particular interventions. Evidence of impact isn’t the be-all and end-all. Other factors, like rights, humane practice and yes, budgets, all need to be factors as well – but evidence should be a part of that picture.

There are three main reasons for this. First, we can be wrong. History is littered with examples — from steroids for brain injuries, to the the scared straight programme, and countless others – that experts thought would work, and which were used for decades, but eventually turned out not to be effective, or even turned out to cause harm. It would be strange if social work was the exception to this rule.

Second, as our social workers in schools project show, even when it comes to an idea that’s proven effective, there can be myriad different ways of doing it. When you’re choosing which one to do, it’s helpful to understand how effective they are.

Finally, there are competing demands on money, energy and time. Social workers can’t be everywhere or do everything, and so a choice has to be made. Choosing to do the things that give us the best shot at making a difference doesn’t seem like it should be controversial. — Michael Sanders

(Picture credit: Unsplash)