Hearing different voices is vital, so we have different ways of listening to our stakeholders.

Stakeholder Advisory Group

The group is representative of practice leaders, social work practitioners, parents and kinship carers and the community and voluntary sector. They meet periodically to advise the Senior Management Team and the Founding Board on What Works for Children’s Social Care’s research priorities, activity and findings. The group works together to bring their individual expertise to help steer What Works for Children’s Social Care.

Hearing the voice of children and young people

We have recruited three Young Advisors who have lived experience of children’s social care to advise the Senior Management Team and the Founding Board about young people’s views and needs. Although we don’t expect young people to access the Centre’s evidence, as the ultimate beneficiaries of better evidence, they should have a voice in the management of the organisation.

We are working with Mind Of My Own, an organisation who create digital tools to enable young people’s voices to be heard, to support to us with engaging a large number of children and young people in better understanding their experiences of children’s social care and in supporting us with identifying new areas for our research. We are excited to be working with Mind Of My Own and focus groups of young people to co-produce this piece of work.

Engaging Children and Young People in our Research

We want to know what children and young people think about our research. We want to know what’s important to them and how research could help answer their questions. Where we are doing primary research in local authorities, we will engage with children and young people in those communities to hear their views and explain our findings.

Reaching Out to Social Workers

We spend a lot of time talking to social workers, and through our polling project we are able to go even further, by capturing the views of large numbers of social workers quickly and easily. We regularly send out polls to our panel of respondents to help us better understand social workers’ attitudes and behaviours regarding important issues that impact practice and shape research. We want to hear from as many people as possible, so if you are an HCPC registered social worker and would like to sign up for polling please use this link. If you have any questions about polling please email us at wwcpolling@nesta.org.uk

Newsletter

The best way to keep up to date is by signing up to receive our monthly newsletter. You will hear about the progress of our projects, as well as new opportunities to work with us.