The Centre has completed scoping reviews, systematic reviews and specialist reports in the area of safely reducing the need for children to enter care.

Overview of Administrative Data on Children’s Social Care in England: This report provides an overview of the administrative data on children’s social care that exists, how the data is currently used, and suggesting ways it could be used for future research.

How family budget change interventions affect children being in care: A rapid evidence assessment. This report summarises the research evidence on how changing a family budget can affect the likelihood on children being in care. It identifies four causal pathways to explain how increasing or decreasing a family’s budget can impact the likelihood of children being in care.

Shared Decision-Making: What is good practice in delivering meetings? Involving families meaningfully in decision-making to keep children safely at home. This report  develops our understanding of what good practice is for meetings that facilitate shared decision-making between children and families in order to safely reduce the need for children to be in care.

Systematic review and meta analysis of Intensive Family Preservation Services to prevent out-of-home placement of children. This report looks at how effective this in-home crisis intervention service is at safely reducing the need for a child to enter care.

Mixed methods systematic review of the effectiveness of Signs of Safety in reducing the need for children to be in care. This report considers whether, how, for whom and under what conditions Signs of Safety works to safely reduce care numbers. The review includes a summary for practitioners and an implementation summary for managers, and whilst it finds no evidence that Signs of Safety does not work, nor does it find compelling evidence that it does.

Scoping review into safely reducing the need for children to enter care, this identifies key evidence clusters, gaps and uncertainties on what works in safely reducing the need for children and young people to enter into statutory care.