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The Childrens social care innovation programme (CSCIP) was launched in 2014 to test and share effective ways of supporting vulnerable children and young people who need help from childrens social care services. The programme has supported 94 projects through 200 million of investment.

About the programme

The programme focused on:

• improving life chances for children who receive help from the social care system
• encouraging innovation by experimenting and replicating successful new approaches
• creating better incentives for innovation and ways of sharing what works
• creating a strong evidence base
• getting better value across the childrens social care sector

Rounds

Round 1 took place between 2014 and 2016. Local authorities were asked to submit applications rethinking:

• childrens social work (improving the quality and impact of childrens social work)
• support for adolescents in, or on the edge of, care (improving the quality and impact of services)

Round 2 took place between 2016 and 2020. It looked to build on the successful innovations found in round 1 (known as scale and spread).

Round 3 (the targeted funding opportunity) took place between 2017 and 2020. We asked for applications in 4 policy areas where there was a need to quickly develop and test new approaches. These 4 areas were set out in the Department for Educations (DfE) policy paper on putting children first: vision for childrens social care.

Partners

DfE funded projects across local authorities and public sector organisations to develop and test innovations that would help childrens social work practitioners and leaders.

There is a full list of projects (MS Excel Spreadsheet, 44.2 KB) that includes name, location, summary and funding amount.

Partners in practice

Some of the local authorities that set up round 1 projects which showed the best impact have gone on to become Partners in practice. The Partners in practice programme is running alongside the Childrens social care innovation programme.

It aims to be a genuine partnership between local and central government by bringing together the best practitioners and leaders in childrens social care to improve the system.

Through the programme the Partners in practice are:

• continuing to demonstrate what works and encourage innovation to create understanding of the conditions needed for excellent practice to flourish
• encouraging sector led improvement through peer support to authorities which need to improve
• supporting DfE to shape and test policy on wider programmes and reform

You can view overall evaluations of Partners in practice in:

• Partners in Practice: practice review (PDF, 737 KB, 37 pages)
• Learning from the Partners in practice programme review: practice briefing (2020)
• Asset Plus feasibility study (PDF, 947 KB, 90 pages)

You can also view individual evaluations for:

• Achieving for Children (Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, and London Borough of Richmond) (PDF, 434 KB, 50 pages)
• Hampshire County Council (PDF, 478 KB, 68 pages)
• Leeds City Council (PDF, 817 KB, 74 pages)
• Triborough - Westminster City Council, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham (in partnership) (PDF, 1.53 MB, 88 pages)
• Lincolnshire County Council (PDF, 719 KB, 54 pages)
• North Yorkshire County Council (PDF, 3.27 MB, 74 pages)
• Islington Council (PDF, 5.29 MB, 102 pages)

The second round of Partners in practice have not been individually evaluated. These are:

• Doncaster Childrens Services Trust
• Essex County Council
• Camden London Borough Council
• Tyneside Alliance (North Tyneside Council and South Tyneside Council in partnership)
• Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council
• Cheshire West and Chester Council

Strengthening families

The Strengthening families, protecting children programme aims to enable more children to stay at home in stable family environments so that fewer children need to be taken in to care. The programme is investing 84 million over 5 years to improve services in 18 local authorities that have high or rising numbers of children in care.

These local authorities will be supported to embed one of 3 models, which have the most promising evidence from the innovation programme of safely reducing the number of children being taken into care. These models are:

• family valued
• family safeguarding
• no wrong door

Supporting families

The Supporting families: investing in practice programme adds to the learning so far from DfEs Childrens social care innovation programme. It has provided over 17 million to enable 45 local authorities to adapt one of 3 of the most successful targeted innovation programme projects. These were projects that have the strongest evidence of successfully keeping families together.

These projects are:

• family drug and alcohol courts supported by the Centre for Justice Innovation
• a model of family group conferencing s
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