Background
An important focus for the School’s Children, young people and families research programme is supporting disadvantaged children and families. Since 2016, the programme has supplied evidence to help those who make decisions that affect families experiencing disadvantage.
The number of children in local authority care has increased, year on year, since 2008. Supporting these children represents a major cost to local authorities. There is an urgent need to identify factors that place children at risk of going into care, and ways to support their families to try to safely prevent these admissions into the care system.
Our research and why it is useful
Davara Bennett was one of the SPHR’s PhD students. Davara set out to improve our understanding of inequalities in children entering care in England, with a view to supporting good policy making and decisions affecting children and families. Despite strong international evidence of an association between poor socioeconomic conditions and children’s hardship, there were important gaps in the evidence.
In an analysis published in BMJ Open, she determined that, between 2007–2019, the risk of being taken into care in England became increasingly clustered in poor places: socioeconomic inequalities in care entry were on the rise. Her research published in The Lancet Public Health showed that the increase in child poverty between 2015 and 2020 was associated with over 10,000 additional children entering care, equivalent to 1 in 12 care entries over the period.
A further paper published in Children and Youth Services Review explored the contribution of prevention spending between 2011-2018 to trends in children entering care. Every £10-per-child decrease in adolescent prevention spending was associated with an estimated additional 1.9 per 100,000 children aged 16-17 entering care the following year. This finding highlights the importance of equitable reinvestment in prevention. Specifically, it points to the protective impact of adolescent services, which may yield relatively short-term benefits, reducing steep care costs that might otherwise have been incurred. This has important implications for policy, which has retained a focus on the early years. This may have left adolescent services particularly vulnerable to cuts in the austerity years, and less likely to attract new investment going forward. Our evidence suggests that this uneven focus may be misguided.
Collectively, these three papers point to the need for funding proportionate to need. The funding formula for distributing central government funds to local authority children’s services was based on 2001 data, and last revised in 2013–14. One key policy implication of the work is that this funding formula is no longer fit for purpose – it needs urgent updating to ensure appropriate resource allocation going forward.
In a parallel qualitative strand of the PhD, Davara conducted semi-structured interviews with local policymakers within Children’s Services. A first qualitative analysis, published in Children and Youth Services Review, showed that policymakers were highly motivated to address the problem of rising care entry. But it also identified a range of obstacles to tackling the socioeconomic drivers of care entry – as well as policy entrepreneurial strategies that may help raise the status of the socioeconomic drivers of care entry on the local policy agenda. A second qualitative paper, currently under review, addresses the role of the public mood, organised political forces, and consensus-building in shaping the Children’s Services policy agenda.
In response to concern from local policymakers about the inequalities impact of Ofsted inspection, Davara explored the unintended consequences of Ofsted inspection. In an analysis published in the Journal of Social Policy, she showed that overall, inspection was associated with a rise in care entry rates across the spectrum of social care interventions. Worse judgements yielded higher rates. Between 2010 and 2020, relative to local authorities that received no inspection, those judged to require improvement saw a 3.2% increase in care entry rates. For those judged inadequate, this rose to 4.6% increase in care entry rates. Inadequate judgements were reliably met with a spike in more acute care and child protection plan interventions across all local authorities – but in more deprived local authorities this may be at the expense of more supportive child-in-need interventions. Ofsted inspections may exacerbate underlying child welfare inequalities.
In an analysis in Wales published in Public Health and building on the work of Davara’s PhD, SPHR researchers found that the most deprived children were 3.4 times more likely to enter care than those who were least deprived. Maternal mental health problems in pregnancy were also associated with higher risk of becoming looked after. Based on these results, successfully tackling maternal mental health issues would reduce the risk of children entering care by an estimated 20%.
Real world impact
Policy implications
- Key findings from the PhD project were presented in a submission to the Department of Work and Pensions select committee on child poverty, leading to recommendations about a cross-government strategy on child poverty.
- The findings were used in evidence given by David Taylor-Robinson at the Covid inquiry.
- The research influenced both the interim and final reports of the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care. Evidence from the work is cited alongside the recommendation that more children be kept safely with their families. An update to the funding formula for Children’s Services was a key recommendation of the review. A fair funding review has been delayed several times but remains on the agenda. Evidence from this SPHR research should be used in future consultations to ensure that resources for local authorities stay linked to local need.
- A collaboration with the National Children’s Bureau (NCB) increased the reach of the findings. NCB have produced and disseminated briefings to key policymakers (see example).
- With support from child welfare inequalities researchers in the field, the paper on the unintended consequences of Ofsted inspection was shared with Ofsted officials, and supplementary material requested and shared.
- The study authors have participated in key consultations. A submission to the Senedd inquiry on Welsh Government’s progress in delivering its commitment to ‘radical reform’ of services for care experienced people informed their resulting report. They also submitted a response to the consultation in England on the ‘children’s social care national framework’, emphasising the need for anti-poverty approaches and better data on socioeconomic conditions.
- The study authors have worked with Health Equity North and “The Child of the North” All Party Parliamentary Group to raise the profile of prevention for children at risk of entering the care system. Their reports, underpinned by SPHR research, have been cited in parliament more than ten times, including at PMQs. Among them is a report on Children in Care in the North of England, led by Davara and co-authored by care experienced young people Mia Hankinson and Katelin Kay.
- Davara’s PhD research has underpinned the development of a Children at Risk Research Development Network. The network brings together researchers from across the North to develop place-based solutions to the problem of high rates of children entering care.
- The Fair Funding Review 2.0 2025 adapts the formula for local governments by considering deprivation when measuring the “need” of that area for children’s social care funding. The Fair Funding Review references the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care as part of the impetus for its decision making, which drew on these research findings. These recommendations were also reiterated in a response to the Fair Funding Review consultation written and submitted by Phil McHale, which draws on this evidence and others in explaining the role of deprivation in the exacerbation of health inequalities.
Throughout, SPHR researchers have championed care experienced children and young people’s inclusion in decision-making processes, in Liverpool and nationally, aligning with the principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The network has co-produced digital stories with care experienced people; these stories have formed the launching-off point for the network’s discussions of future research priorities.
News and media coverage
- On publication of a press release for a key study from this project, there was wide press coverage, including national articles in BBC Online, the Daily Mail, and the Independent, articles for local media, and several live radio interviews.
- More general dissemination is essential to improve public understanding of childhood adversity. Efforts to engage the wider public led to a BBC Sounds piece on children in care and the rising cost-of-living.
- The study was also noted in an article by Gordon Brown on the cost-of-living crisis.
- The Children in Care in the North of England report garnered more than 370 pieces of media coverage of the Children in Care report launch. It secured extensive national and regional coverage across print, broadcast and online media – including lead story on BBC Radio 4’s World at One programme, featuring an interview with the report’s lead author and a mother with personal experience of having her child removed. Wes Streeting and James Daley were then pressed for comment live on air.
Other dissemination outputs
- Capitalising on widespread media coverage, and with a view to addressing common misconceptions about the relationship between poverty and out of home care, Davara created a video animation for the paper on the relationship between poverty and care.
- The evidence also features in a blog entitled ‘What did local government ever do for us?’.
- Davara has written lay summaries of SPHR and related work on child welfare inequalities. These summaries have been shared with a range of stakeholders, including the Department for Education, and the Department of Work and Pensions, Child Poverty Action Group, and Foundations.
- Effect estimates from the study of the impact of child poverty on care entry were used in a study modelling the consequences of achieving different child poverty targets for a range of child health outcomes. This wider research builds towards our collective goal of better informing policymakers at a time of resource scarcity. The results have been fed into the Government’s Child Poverty Task Force.
- Recognising the window of opportunity for informing policy, project researchers have published a BMJ editorial pressing for policy change to alleviate child poverty.
