What Works for Children’s Social Care and the Centre for Transforming Access and Student Outcomes in Higher Education (TASO) are running a joint call for evidence and practice on programmes which aim to increase the progression to, and success in, higher education, of young people who are, or have been, in care.

This follows the publication of our report, which shows that young people with care experience hold lower expectations of progressing to higher education, are less likely to attend, and that their expectations deteriorate over time more than their peers.

We are seeking higher education providers, local authorities, charities and other organisations to confidentially share information about the work that they are doing to support these individuals to access and succeed in higher education. We are particularly interested in evidence on the impact of this work. We are not necessarily asking for evidence of the best interventions or approaches, but examples of your strongest and most robust evidence, regardless of participant outcomes or methodology.

Evidence submitted will shared between WWCSC and TASO. We will use this evidence to help write a report, which we plan to publish later this year. No higher education providers, local authorities, charities or other organisations will be identified in any publication unless we receive written permission to do so. We may also ask your permission to refer to your evidence in a repository of best practice as part of our evidence toolkit.

We are seeking organisational partners – local authorities, police agencies and schools (secondary schools and sixth form colleges) – who would be interested in delivering workforce well-being interventions in their workplace. 

Employee wellbeing is increasingly recognised as a vital ingredient in achieving any organisation’s goals. There is an emerging body of evidence linking employee happiness with overall productivity, engagement and staff turnover. Public-sector workforces in particular face added pressures due to resource and budget constraints. 

We have developed a series of wellbeing interventions in collaboration with researchers from the Harvard Business School, King’s College London, University of East Anglia and What Works for Wellbeing to build evidence around ways to increase the wellbeing of social workers, police officers and teachers across England. 

We will be delivering wellbeing interventions in conjunction with research partners later in 2020. 

All interventions are based on insights from the field of behavioural science, and include the following:

1. Symbolic Awards – messages of gratitude and recognition going to employees from beneficiaries (i.e.past care leavers, past students) to improve one’s sense of feeling valued at work
2. Dictation Software* – providing a dictation software tool to help alleviate administrative burden for social workers
3. Protected Time* – providing social workers with protected, distraction-free blocks of time during their regular scheduled hours to work on work tasks to alleviate time pressure
   
   * Local Authorities Only

If you are interested in conducting this research at your local authority / school / police agency, please fill out the form below. We are accepting applications until Friday, September 4th, but we would highly encourage you to register your interest as soon as possible, as we will be beginning to launch projects with partners in the Autumn. 

Express your interest

If you have any questions that have not been answered above, please email us.

Through this funding round, What Works for Children’s Social Care will be seeking to support the implementation of sector-led innovation in children’s social care settings, and aims to understand the impact of the chosen programmes by means of a robust evaluation.

This is a two-stage application process: The first stage, where we invited organisations (including children’s social care teams, local authorities, charities, third sector organisations and SMEs) to submit an outline of their proposed programme or intervention, closed on July 13th.

We are most interested in applications for programmes that show early signs of promise, are scalable, and would be ready for rigorous evaluation. We anticipate appointing a first round of projects in September 2020, and would expect these projects to begin implementation by December 2020.

The first of these open funding rounds closed in July 2020, and we expect that we will re-open applications in early Autumn 2020.

For more information with regards to the first funding round, please see the below documents:

• Guidance for Applicants
• Frequently Asked Questions

If you have any further questions about this funding call please feel free to email us at programmes@whatworks-csc.org.uk.