Care proceedings and children's care 2009-2017

Masson, Judith (2018). Care proceedings and children's care 2009-2017. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-853328

The study will identify outcomes for children of care proceedings by linking administrative data on children's services with data collected in a study of these proceedings. Linking research data about their court cases with administrative records about children's subsequent care can provide an account of outcomes for children, which will assist professionals working in the family justice system to make better decisions about children in these proceedings. Supplemented with information drawn from children's local authority social work files and interviews with professionals responsible for services, the study will demonstrate the power and limitations of administrative data in understanding outcomes of care proceedings. This innovative use of administrative data will be useful to academics and non academics, developing knowledge of the effects of contemporary policy and practice in child protection, and enabling a systemic and interactive approach to understanding care proceedings. The DfE and Cafcass are project partners supporting research access to the administrative datasets. In England and Wales, local authorities bring care proceedings in the family court to secure the protection of children where suitable arrangements cannot be made with parental agreement. The court's role is to make decisions and orders in the child's best interests, to secure justice for parents and children, and to hold the local authority to account. To achieve this it scrutinises the local authority's care plan and considers other proposals for the child's care from parents/ relatives and the child's representative (Cafcass guardian). Decisions in these cases are necessarily based on a prognosis about the child's future care but courts obtain no information about what happens to children subsequently. This is true for most of those working in the family justice system (judges, lawyers, children's guardians, expert witnesses and social workers. Following these proceedings, local authorities have the responsibility for implementing the care plan/order by looking after children subject to care orders, finding families for those subject to adoption plans and supervising or supporting supporting those cared for in their families. Administrative records are kept on each child in the care system or supported by the local authority, and these provide accounts of social care performance by local authority and over time. This study will use these data to provide an account of the care/service histories for a sample of approximately 290 children subject to care proceedings in 2009-11, collected in an earlier ESRC study of practice in 6 local authorities. Data from these proceedings provides a rich account of children's pre-care lives and the court process through which plans were scrutinised and orders made. Linking these datasets will provide a nuanced account of the impact on children's lives of the legal and social work process that are applied to them. In 2013, a new process for care proceedings (now PLO 2014) was introduced to secure case completion in 26 weeks, approximately half the time taken previously. Court powers to order assessments were controlled, making courts more reliant on information from the local authority. The study will draw a new sample of care proceedings brought by the same 6 local authorities in 2014 to compare processes, decision-making and outcomes for children after 1 year with those in the earlier data. This will establish the extent to which shorter proceedings are resulting in more timely decisions for children, different plans and orders in proceedings, and different outcomes for children one year after the final court order. Outputs will include a report, summaries for family justice professionals, articles in academic law, social work and research methods journals, and for practitioners. There will be impacts on practice in child care and protection in the family court and local authorities.

Data description (abstract)

The project aim was 1) to examine the process of care (child protection) proceedings and the orders granted for two random samples of c 300 children subject to these proceedings before (S1) and after (S2) major legal reforms intended to streamline and shorten proceedings. The samples were selected from 6 (anonymous) local authorities, 5 in Southern England and 1 in Wales. These data are recorded in a child level SPSS database. 2) to establish children’s post court outcomes and the utility of Department for Education Administrative data for this by linking data collected above to administrative data relating to children’s social care. 3) to capture the qualitative information about the child’s progress and well-being, that is not available through the DfE data, one year (T1) and 5 years (T2) after the proceedings ended. This included information about the care plan, the reasons for any changes of plan or placement (reasons for placement changes have only been requested in the SSDA903 returns since 2015-16), family contact (birth parents, siblings, other relatives), services and support needed or supplied, the child’s physical and mental health, and behavioural and emotional wellbeing In each local authority 10 files were selected from each sample; the selection criteria were their age at the end of proceedings and the order made in proceedings. Researcher ratings were made for children’s wellbeing as explained below. Data from these files was extracted and recorded in an SPSS data base. 4) These quantitative datasets are supplemented by 1) interview data collected in 2016-17 from local authority managers and lawyers in each local authority in the Study, exploring policies and practices relating to care proceedings, care plans, assessment of carers and provision of services. 2) focus group data from focus groups in 2018 with judges who hear care proceedings. This material is in a NVivo database. 5) Quantitative data on court outcomes was supplemented by identifying any further proceedings up to November 2017 relating to the children in the Cafcass cms and e-cms databases (these data were not available for Wales).

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