The pilot evaluation of the post-proceedings support component of Family Drug and Alcohol Courts (FDAC) is part of the Department for Education (DfE) funded Supporting Families: Investing in Practice programme.

Family Drug and Alcohol Court (FDAC) uses a problem solving approach to care proceedings, where a team of substance misuse specialists, domestic violence experts, psychiatrists and social workers, carry out an early assessment and agree an intervention plan with parents who come before the court in care proceedings. Once in proceedings, parents begin a “trial for change”, supported by the specialist team and with fortnightly non-lawyer review meetings with the judge, who reviews the progress being made as well as adjudicating in the case.

In Gloucestershire, the FDAC team has been offering additional post-proceedings support (PPS) to all families that have gone through FDAC since 2013. The FDAC team offers a year-long support programme following the conclusion of proceedings, in order to provide more intensive and on-going multi-agency support. This support is tailored to the needs of the family and child(ren). Family participation is voluntary, and involves the continuation of elements of FDAC.

The priorities for this pilot are:

1. to conduct a process evaluation to better understand this PPS intervention and document how it has been implemented and delivered;
2. to produce a manualised version of the intervention, which would lend itself to replication by other sites;
3. to determine how feasible it would be to scale-up and evaluate this intervention.

Data will be collected from parents who completed FDAC and have received PPS between 2013 and the present, parents who did not graduate from FDAC, the FDAC team and related professionals, using interviews, focus groups, administrative data collection, and examination of existing post-proceedings documentation.

Set up work began in early 2020, and the pilot evaluation will conclude by October 2022.