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- How effective are the key reforms set out in ‘Stable Homes, Built on Love’ in response to the Care Review that seek to improve the provision of children's social care across Local Authorities? These include recruitment of foster carers, support for kinship carers and provision of children's care placements.
- How do we best support children, young people and their families within the social care system and prevent poor outcomes, including recruiting, retaining and training our workforce?
- How do we create a SEND and AP system that better meets the needs of children and their families? Building on the SEND and AP improvement plan, we would like to better understand local delivery, partnership working in the system, cost and financial stability. What does good provision look like and how can we share best practice?
- How can we best identify and intervene early to support vulnerable children and their families before they enter the social care system?
- What are the risk factors for children’s involvement in serious violence and what interventions and approaches are most effective in reducing it?
- How can high quality training and support for the early years workforce improve child outcomes?
- How do we improve parental access to, and engagement with, family services? How do we improve connections and relationships between parents and professionals (e.g. through parental networks)?
- Which services, programmes and interventions are effective for improving parenting capacity and quality and the early years home learning environment?
- Are these programmes acceptable to families and easily scalable?
- How does the most appropriate support (financial and non-financial) vary by groups? Including younger and older people, those from different minority ethnic groups, refugees, ex-service personnel, women, parents, victims of domestic abuse and those with complex needs, mental health conditions or homelessness?
- How can DWP and its partners maximise sustainable compliance with child maintenance arrangements?
- How effective are child maintenance and associated policies at supporting separated families, encouraging family-based arrangements, reducing conflict and helping children and adults achieve better outcomes? And how does this differ by group?
- How can we better understand the impact of interventions delivered in the community? What timing and sequencing of services, interventions and support works to sustain positive outcomes for individuals? For example, accommodation; employment; relationship, family and peer support?
- Relationship between extremism and integration, dynamics of friendship/familial and community relationships, and links between hate crime, other societal crimes and extremism.
- Where children cannot live with their birth parents, how do we support and enable others (including wider family networks) to provide good quality care which leads to better life outcomes?
• How does this vary for different family types, including both formal and informal kinship carers, foster carers, and children who leave care under an adoption order or special guardianship order?
- How can we mitigate the factors that put stress on families and enable them to have suitable housing and good quality home environments?
• How much information and understanding do education providers across our sectors have about students’ home circumstances, and what adjustments do they make?
- What are the most cost-effective ways to help where children are at risk as victims or perpetrators of crime? Does this vary for different groups of children, such as children with care experience, and by place?
- What is known about drivers and barriers to parental engagement in their children’s education in the home? How can improvements in the home-learning environment mitigate the effect of disadvantage on pupils’ attainment?
- What makes communities resilient to natural hazards and other crises? What can we learn from the coronavirus pandemic about the loss of resilience and protecting vulnerable communities to inform future response to crises? What are the important social dimensions for achieving environmental and infrastructure resilience?
- Who is affected by it?
- How can we ensure that multi-agency responses are coordinated effectively to reduce, and ideally prevent, young people’s exposure to and experience of harm?
• How do we ensure that front line staff have access to all the relevant information from across systems and agencies, to ensure effective decision making in provision of support?
- • How can we ensure staff maintain stable relationships with the children and families that they work with where appropriate to counter disruption in other aspects of their lives?
- • How effective are changes to the (children's) residential care market in ensuring the right number and types of good quality, stable registered places across the country, which provide good value for public money?
- What works best to identify and intervene early to support vulnerable children and their families before they enter the social care system?
- • How effective are trauma and resilience theory informed inputs for staff? Can teacher training about brain development, the stress response, co-regulation strategies and how to teach self-regulation improve student's behaviour in class and help children achieve and thrive?
- How can we better support families and children to keep children safe and, where possible, with their birth families?
- What factors influence children’s brain development from birth to the early 20s, and what works in supporting healthy brain development to enable learning? (See also our Areas of Research Interest in relation to the ‘Every child achieving and thriving’ pillar of the Opportunity Mission)
- What are the drivers of pupils not attending school and what factors influence pupils being at risk of becoming persistently absent?
- • What are the links between genomics and SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) conditions, and how might we best prepare educators, care-providers, parents, and children for increased genomics data?
- What are the most cost-effective ways to support parents and carers to help their children to learn and develop (from early years through to adulthood), including through play?
- How do children’s home lives influence whether they can thrive and achieve throughout their lives? How do both their material and non-material living conditions affect their later outcomes?
- How can education and other services best support parents and carers to help their children learn outside formal education settings (including in other locations beyond the home when the home learning environment is not conducive to learning)?
- How well-used are available family services (such as family hubs and children’s centres services) and how representative are these users? How can we make these services more attractive and easier to access for those parents and carers whose children stand to benefit the most?
- How do we improve connections and relationships between parents and professionals (e.g. through parental networks)?
- Which parenting programmes are most effective, especially in engaging disadvantaged parents and families with a social worker? Are they equally accessible to all families, including those that are hard to reach, and easily scalable?
- What more can be done to best support families with children under the age of 2, to give those children, particularly the most disadvantaged, the best start in life?
- Which early childhood services, or combinations of services, are most effective in improving the (health, cognitive, socio-emotional, and educational) development of disadvantaged children before age 5? How does this vary by children’s age (for example 0-2 and 3-5) and for different domains of learning (such as literacy and maths)?
- How can we identify those who will not achieve a good level of development at age 5, to help target early childhood services before school entry?
- How can we best develop tools to assess development before school-age, so we can measure important changes in educational outcomes over time and understand the relative impact of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) and home learning environment?
- Which interventions in early years settings are most effective in supporting child development, for whom, when, where and why?
- How do we ensure that all children, particularly those in most need, can access and participate in good quality early learning?
- What can we do to reduce barriers to take-up of childcare and to work, particularly for parents from disadvantaged communities?
- How can parental engagement in their children's early education best be enhanced, especially for those parents in disadvantaged households, and how does this vary for mothers and fathers?
- What is the optimal amount and type of early education in formal settings? How does this vary for different groups of children?
- What works to raise attainment, taking account of different starting points and different contexts experienced by children, including the most disadvantaged?
- • How can we support all children by removing barriers to opportunity, balancing high standards for all with support for those who need it most, including the most disadvantaged children?
- • How can schools best work with parents and carers to help their children to arrive each day ready to learn, to get the most from each school day and support their learning outside school?
- What works best to ensure high levels of school attendance, when, where, with whom and why?
- • What (individual, school and wider) factors contribute to different types of absences (low-level, persistent, and severe)? Are there significant differences in the root causes of these various types, or differences by age?
- • What factors influence parental attitudes to school attendance and what can we do to address them?
- • What types of practice and/or interventions (including both by schools and other parties such as local authorities), work to prevent or reduce the different types of absence (including low-level, persistent and severe absence) and how do they affect other outcomes (including wellbeing)?• What conditions need to be in place for schools and/or local authorities to effectively implement these interventions?
- • What is the experience of those outside mainstream education (whether being home schooled, excluded from school, in Alternative Provision, attending special schools or Young Offender Institutions) and their parents? Where relevant: how and when could/should these children be helped back into mainstream education?
- • How do we ensure that all children have strong attendance during transitions from primary to secondary school? (See also ‘Every child achieving and thriving’ on transitions)
- "• What are the most cost-effective school and classroom practices to help children develop positive relationships and pro-social behaviour at school and increase school attendance – especially for those children with challenging behaviour? How do these vary for different groups (and for those students with SEND, for different types of need)? "
- • What models of [school-aged childcare] provision (e.g. breakfast clubs, after school clubs, homework clubs and holiday provision) are most effective (for whom, when, where and why)?
- • How can childcare for school aged children better support disadvantaged children and children with SEND?
- What data, evidence and analytical tools (preventative analytics) are required to identify populations at risk of homelessness, such as families facing eviction, victims of domestic abuse, or individuals with precarious work conditions? What are the best means of outreach and engagement with at-risk populations?
- What support do children and victims of domestic abuse living in temporary accommodation and domestic abuse safe accommodation need and to what extent is this being delivered?
- How can we identify children that are at risk of offending at an early stage? How can we prevent the transmission of intergenerational offending to children and young people in families with a history of offending? How can we minimise the criminogenic impact of a child’s contact with the youth justice system?
- How effective are the Family Hubs pilots in improving outcomes for young children and their families? What works best to engage families and deliver services?
- Which parenting programmes are most effective?
- What works to address the change in parental attitudes towards attendance?
- What can we do to support children and their families develop well from birth before entering formal education (and to the start of adulthood for those with SEND)?
- What are the causes, consequences and costs associated with parental conflict and family breakdown? What is effective in avoiding or mitigating parental conflict and for whom? How do parental characteristics including worklessness, low skills, lack of stable housing, ethnicity, parents in the perinatal stage, LGBTQ+, being (or having been) a member of the armed forces, mental health and parents with SEND children interact with conflict and influence what works?
- How can we minimise the harm to those engaging with the family justice system? What factors affect the effectiveness of Domestic Violence Protection Orders and other measures in the Domestic Abuse Bill?
- How do orders made in private family law proceedings – for example, resolving disputes about child or financial arrangements – affect individual and family outcomes? What works, for whom, to deliver positive and sustainable outcomes?
- What are the long-term impacts on children’s developmental outcomes because of placements made under public law orders in care proceedings? Including care orders, placement orders, and special guardianship orders?
- Improving outcomes for victims and survivors, including children.
- How do we ensure access to rich and engaging opportunities in and outside of pre-school and school settings, particularly for disadvantaged children? Which are the most cost-effective in helping children to achieve and thrive?
- • What opportunities do children have at present for enrichment activities (including opportunities for play, especially outdoor play, breaks, and engagement with nature) and how does this vary by place, family, and personal characteristics? What are the barriers to take-up?
- • What factors and characteristics support healthy use of technology (such as mobile phones and tablets) by children of different ages, and what impact do they have?
- • How can we equip parents, families, and carers to support children through safe access and use of technology outside educational settings?
- How can we best support children and adults who lack or have lacked family support (such as those who have experienced care) to maximise their opportunities to live a healthy and rewarding life?
- What family focused solutions work to ensure that children and their parents have the support needed to meet their basic needs for housing security and quality of life?