Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council plans to embed a team of 6 social workers and 3 senior practitioners across the Werneth school cluster, which consists of 2 secondary schools and 9 primary schools.

The aim of this project is to prevent harm to children, deal with any such issues that arise more swiftly, and reduce the need for higher levels of statutory social care involvement.

This project will  further develop Stockport’s ‘Team Around the School’ model to embed the new team of social care professionals alongside the multidisciplinary team that already includes a school nurse, early help worker, education welfare, Police Community Support Officer and housing officer. Each social worker will have a base at one of the secondary schools, and will work with approximately 15-20 children within these schools.

A qualitative evaluation will inform our understanding  of the implementation of the underlying mechanisms of the intervention (what makes it work), the way that contextual factors can influence these, and the implementation of the programme. A quasi-experimental design will be used to provide an initial indication of the potential impact of the intervention on referrals to children’s social care and the number of days spent in care. This will involve a  comparing the Werneth cluster of schools with a cluster of schools that are matched with the intervention group based on characteristics such as number of pupils, level of need, and historic trends in outcomes.

The evaluation of the programme will begin in Spring 2019, and run until March 2020, when a final report will be published.