1. Working Together: Aspiration or Reality
Working Together: Aspiration or Reality? Joint Principal Social Workers’ Network Conference Monday 16 July The What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care: progress and plans
Ewan King, Director, SCIE and Engagement Lead, WWC for Children’s Social Care
Anna Bacchoo, Senior Social Worker, SCIE and WWC for Children’s Social Care

2. About the WWC for Children’s Social Care
The WWC seeks better outcomes for children, young people and families by bringing the best available evidence to practitioners and other decision makers across the children's social care sector
Funded by the DFE, the Centre is being set up by a development team and its research partner and will be fully independent by 2020
It will:
Identify gaps in the evidence, and create new evidence through trials and evaluations
Collate, synthesise and review existing evidence
Develop, test and publish tools and services that support the greater use of evidence and inform the design of the future Centre
Champion the application of robust standards of evidence in children's social care research

3. Engagement and co-design are central to our approach - we have engaged sector extensively

4. Key messages Help to foster a culture of learning
Work with the sector, rather than ‘do to’
Keep children, young people and families at the heart
Have a strong, realistic focus on implementation and improving practice, allowing for local context and nuance
Explore what works to create the conditions for good social work
Help to foster a culture of learning
Be aware of the ‘joins’ with other agencies
Learn from others, and do not duplicate
Offer challenge, including to Government

5. Setting up the organisation
Recruitment of new Chair: Sir Alan Wood
Established Founding Board – Kersten England, CEO, Bradford Council; Isabelle Trowler, Chief Social Worker for England (Children and Families); Sally Hodges, DCS, Solihull
Range of formal panels to feed into WWC development:
Advisory Council
Practitioners’ Panel
VCS Forum
CYP Panel
Families and carers

6. Research topics
Our initial research projects were selected following consultation with the sector and initial reviews of the literature.
In the first instance, we will focus on one priority area and three exploratory areas for further work: Safely reducing the need for children to enter care
Development topics:
Supervision and decision-making
The “front door”( local authorities’ arrangements for responding to safeguarding concerns)
Workforce well-being, retention and turnover

7. Working with Local Partners
Wave 1 Partners - July to December 2018
We have started working with 21 local authority partners to co-design and test promising tools and services that aim:
to make research evidence more relevant
make insights from research evidence more accessible
help people to use evidence well
help practice leaders to foster cultures in which effective evidence use is the norm.
Wave 2 Partners – September 2018 to 2020

8. Working with local partners
The first wave of partnership working will run from July – December 2018.
Areas of focus:
Developing digital tools for more effective working with data
Developing a ‘DIY self-evaluation toolkit’
Exploring promising practice that might be evaluated with the Centre’s research partner
Improving the accessibility and usefulness of website
Developing a peer-to-peer networking tool through which evidence insights can be shared
Developing an ‘evidence masterclass’ that aims to improve evidence literacy
Developing a diagnostic tool to assess an organisation’s ‘evidence readiness’

9. Next steps and staying in touch
Recruiting a senior leadership team
Building strong alliances with the key stakeholders in our sector
Bringing forward a five year strategy that includes securing a strong financial base for the WWC
Laying out a clear map of the existing evidence base, and design a relevant and focused programme of research and evaluation that addresses the gaps and weaknesses
Delivering programme to produce accessible, relevant evidence to the sector by promoting the work of the pioneer local authority partners and representing evidence of effective services from the DfE’s Innovation Programme.

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