How do differing rates and modes of child welfare service interventions impact upon educational and criminal justice outcomes of vulnerable children?

Intervention by child welfare services (CWS) aims to reduce exposure to maltreatment, trauma, or other adverse experiences, either through improvements in family functioning or because the child is placed in care. Notwithstanding the positive intent of CWS involvement, research suggests that there is an attendance and attainment gap in education for children within the care system which widens with the level of social care intervention (Berridge et al., 2020; Jay & McGrath-Lone, 2019; Department for Education, 2020). Furthermore, those with care experiences are 'between three and five times as likely as their peers in the general population to be made subject to a formal youth justice disposal' (Bateman, 2021), while approximately half of the children in custody in England and Wales have been in care at some point in their childhood (Prison Reform Trust, 2016).
Despite such strong evidence of severe disproportionality in negative outcomes, to date there is limited understanding of the complex causal relationships between engagement with child welfare systems and future negative outcomes. Access to linked DfE and MoJ data provides a novel opportunity to address this gap in knowledge, and in doing so shape policy and practice reform to improve support to some of our most vulnerable children and young people. This proposed research will utilise this novel linked data set to examine, for the first time, how differential application of CWS interventions impacts upon educational disengagement and criminal justice involvement.
By utilising advanced statistical techniques, the complexity of the data will be considerd by taking account of the cumulative impact of community, school, family and individual level factors known to influence risk and protection for negative outcomes, and the specific impact of differing modes of CWS interventions, at different ages and stages of development. This will include consideration to how interventions and supports within the education and criminal justice systems may impact on care experiences and subsequent negative outcomes. It will extend the methods and approaches of the Child Welfare Inequalities Project to consider the impact of the heightened use of CWS interventions in local authorities with high social deprivation or inequality (CWIP; Bywaters et al., 2020).
Research questions will include:
1) What risk or protective effect does a CWS intervention during childhood offer for education engagement and attainment, and later engagement with CJS, when other multisystemic risk and protective factors are controlled for?
2) Are the outcomes for child educational attainment and engagement, and engagement with CJS following intervention from child welfare services equitable across local authorities?
3) What is the effect of age of first identification of welfare needs of a child or family, and the duration and degree of subsequent social welfare intervention, on education attainment and engagement, and engagement with CJS?
As well as enabling written reports of findings published in academic journals, findings will be shared through innovative data visualisation and a professionally produced promotional video, targeted at policy and practice communities. These activities will seek to communicate the value of analysing data in this way, as well as the key findings of the study. Well established relationships with a range of non-academic stakeholders, including the British Association of Social Workers, Research in Practice, and the South Yorkshire Teaching Partnership (a collaboration of seven local authorities), will ensure immediate impact upon existing policy and practice debates regarding the future of children and families social work, including the effectiveness of support to vulnerable young people, the need for collaborative strategies between social work, education and criminal justice, and the use of data to inform local authority strategy and commissioning