SOCRATES

This evaluation was about how digital or electronic records are being used when adults are receiving care in their own homes or in care homes. Care records are written notes about someone’s health and wellbeing and the treatment or support they have been receiving. Organisations that provide care for adults are being encouraged to record information digitally, instead of on paper. This change in the way things are done is encouraged because it can mean information can be shared more easily between health and social care services and used to improve people’s lives.

This evaluation was led by a team at CPEC, LSE

The questions we asked in this evaluation cover the following areas:

• why organisations have or have not started to digitise their care records
• people’s expectations about how digitising care records will change things
• people’s experiences of moving from paper to digital care records and using features of digital records like family portals
• what people see has changed as a result of going digital and whether they feel the changes have made their lives better or worse and in what ways
• whether different groups of people with different life experiences experience going digital similarly or differently and the ways in which that matters to people’s lives
• what the economic impacts of digital care records are for social care providers.

To answer our questions, we found out about what was happening in home care and care homes in different parts of the country. We thought that it was useful to look at places that had different experiences of going digital. So, we included organisations that had not yet started going digital, were in the process of going digital, or had gone digital a year or more ago.

We used a multiple case study approach, which meant we looked in detail at the process of going digital within several care provider organisations. This helped us understand how the context shaped people’s experiences. Our research included interviewing senior leaders in organisations that provided care for adults and gathering the perspectives of people who drew on care, their families and friends and care workers. Researchers (including members of the public who wanted to work with us as ‘peer researchers’) visited the organisations to collect this information.

Three people working in the sector and three people drawing on social care were recruited to an Evaluation Advisory Network for this study. They provided feedback on proposed research methods and were involved in helping to recruit different groups and settings for the evaluation. We recruited more people to this network from the sites. The network continued to provide guidance as the research progressed and supported us in sharing our learnings.

Articles

Snow M, Silva-Ribeiro W, Baginsky M, Di Giorgio S, Farrelly N, Larkins C, Poole K, Steils N, Westwood J, Malley J. (2025) Best Practices for Implementing Electronic Care Records in Adult Social Care: Rapid Scoping Review. JMIR Aging;8:e60107. DOI: 10.2196/60107.
URL: https://aging.jmir.org/2025/1/e60107

Malley J, Westwood J, Snow M, Farrelly N, Steils N, Henderson C, Larkins C (2026) A rapid evaluation of the implementation of Digital Social Care Records in England. Health Soc Care Deliv Res 2026;14(16). DOI: 10.3310/GJJW2821

URL: https://www.journalslibrary.nihr.ac.uk/hsdr/GJJW2821

Briefing Notes

DiSCRE - Recommendations

This briefing note presents 10 evidence-based recommendations for policymakers involved in making decisions about digital technology for social care. They can support the effective implementation of Digital Social Care Records (DSCRs).

DiSCRE - Key messages

This briefing shares ten key messages to help ensure different people involved in adult social care can make the most out of implementing digital care records.

DiSCRE - Accessible findings

This leaflet shares key messages to help make sure digital care records work well for people drawing on care and their families.

Webinars

Evaluating the implementations of digital social care records: Phase 1

Evaluating the implementations of digital social care records: Phase 2

For more information about this project, please contact: M.Snow@lse.ac.uk

This evaluation was about Young People’s Independent Domestic Violence Advisers (YPIDVAs). We wanted to find out how they support young people who are at risk of significant harm in their own relationships. This form of abuse in relationships can include physical, sexual and or emotional abuse by a current or ex-partner.

YPIDVAs are specialist trained domestic violence (DV) safety workers. They support children and young people aged 6 to 19 at risk of significant harm from domestic violence and abuse, including abuse in their own relationships. They try to offer support that fits with what young people need and want.

Research showed that between a third and a half of young people aged 13–17 experience some form of abuse in their relationships. But not much research has looked into the type of help they receive or the experiences of young people who receive support from DV advisors, and there is little research on the experiences of DV advisors and other organisations.

This project was led by a team at ULAN.

This evaluation aimed to find out which young people used DV advisors. That included, how young people got in contact with services, what they wanted from workers and whether the support was what they needed. We also aimed to find out about what advisors thought they were achieving and what other organisations such as schools and health providers thought about DV advisor services. We tried to understand more about what worked and what could be improved so that DV advisor services offered the best possible support.

The broad questions we aimed to answer were:

· Which agencies referred young people to DV advisors, and which young people were being referred into DV advisor services?

· What were the barriers to young people accessing these services, what made it easy to access them and what helped young people stay in contact with DV advisors?

· What did young people think about the service they received, and what would young people like to change about the service?

· What were the expected outcomes of the service, including wellbeing and safety, and any benefits that young people experienced?

· Were there any unintended impacts for different groups of young people?

· What was it like getting support to have your say when different organisations were working together, and how was information shared between different organisations?

· How could learning from about what worked be shared and spread to different areas, including what outcomes could be explored more in future evaluations?

To answer these questions, we found out what young people, DV advisors and other organisations thought of DV advisor services. The research took place in 4 or 5 different sites across England and Wales.

To make sure that we learned as much as we could from the experiences of DV advisors, we only included services that had been running for 18 months or more.

We looked in detail at the process of using and providing DV advisor support.

This helped us to understand how services were experienced by different people. We did this by looking at information already being collected by DV advisor services on things such as how many and which young people they supported.

We invited a range of young people from each service to talk with us. This included up to young people and DV advisors and managers from each site. We then talked with other organisations who might affect or be affected by DV advisor services.

The team are awaiting publication of their first paper and are now working on the analysis of the second paper with our their young people contributors.

They presented a paper based on the first publication at the European Conference on Domestic Violence, Barcelona, Spain, Sept 2025.

For more information about this project, please contact: CABarter@lancashire.ac.uk

For years, policy reports had highlighted the need for better information sharing between agencies and professionals to improve child safeguarding. Despite advice from the Department for Education (DfE), there was still confusion about when to share information. This led to updated guidance by the DfE in May 2024.

A 2021 report by the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel (CSPRP), The Myth of Invisible Men, looked at 23 cases where male carers had injured babies under one year. Often, families were only known to general and not specialist services until abuse happened. This issue was not limited to babies, as other cases had shown serious injuries or deaths caused by fathers and other significant men in families’ lives. The CSPRP report highlighted that safeguarding practices often overlooked fathers or father figures, despite the potential danger.

Research had shown differences in practices across the country and a lack of evaluation of initiatives that could guide professionals. This project aimed to fill that gap by focusing on information sharing about men who play a significant role in families’ lives who may pose risks to children.

We examined three models of practice:

· Information sharing between local authorities and other agencies, in particular between children’s social care and health services.

· Information sharing when family support services were physically located together with other agencies. Here we looked at the practice in Family Hubs.

· Information sharing across local authorities, using a model where police intelligence contributed to the assessment of needs and the provision of early intervention services. This was the Partnership Integrated Triage or PITstop model that started in the North East of England and had then been adopted or was being adopted more widely. We examined how the original model was being adopted by one local authority in the West Midlands and West Mercia Police.

The authorities where these models were in place also provided the opportunity to examine the impact of:

· Professionals in different agencies having access to shared systems

· Professionals working together in Family Hubs

· What was needed to support the transfer of a practice from one local authority / authorities to another.

This project was led by a team at KCL.

The aims were to:

1. examine if the models of practice that were studied contributed to making fathers more visible by more effective information sharing about fathers / significant men in families’ lives than prior to their introduction.

2. explore if the models improved effective information sharing about fathers / significant men in families’ lives by addressing known barriers to information sharing.

3. produce guidance for local authorities and other agencies on sharing information on fathers / significant men in families’ lives.

4. The main objectives were to explore across the three models of practice:

5. whether specific service arrangements across early help and family support contributed to improved information sharing about fathers / significant men in families’ lives and, if so, how

6. how safeguarding partners - health, local authorities, and police - worked together to share information on fathers / significant men in families’ lives

7. factors that might improve the awareness of, and confidence to, share information on fathers / significant men on families’ lives.

Additional objectives were to:

· assess the importance and impact of shared information systems

· examine how an information sharing initiative transferred from one area to another - without this, successful initiatives might not be adopted more widely

· capture views on whether the revised guidance from the DfE, published in May 2024 (DfE, 2024), would contribute to improved practice

· explore views on the importance of, and any shifts in, agencies’ cultures.

Evaluation questions

1. Within the three models the focus of the questions was on examining to share information between agencies because of:

2. Organisational structures and working practices

3. Professional and organisational cultures

4. Different professional priorities and biases

5. Partnerships databases and systems that did not connect with each other and were not accessible to all partner agencies.

6. Approaches to, and anxiety over, consent to share information and an absence of a shared understanding of what could be shared.

These questions were developed with input from the case study sites. The next phase of co-production involved discussions with individual sites to consider any specific details which the research team needed to be aware of. This helped to ensure that our investigation of these five areas took into account local policies and procedures of how information was shared and interpreted and how relationships with families were managed.

The revised guidance from the DfE was published in May 2024 (DfE, 2024) and we sought to collect feedback on how it was implemented in practice.

We also examined the processes that were needed to support the transfer and adaptation of a ‘model’ from one local authority area to another focusing on the question of how an understanding of effective and appropriate practice could be shared/transferred to other locations.

The evaluation used document analysis, observations, interviews, and focus groups. We developed our methodology and methods further during the first two months of working with agencies involved in the evaluation.

Purcell C, Baginsky M, Steils N. (2025). No quick fixes: multi-agency working to improve information-sharing on men and keep children safe. British Journal of Social Work.
DOI: 10.1093/bjsw/bcaf249

URL: https://academic.oup.com/bjsw/advance-article/doi/10.1093/bjsw/bcaf249/8324434

Baginsky, M., Purcell, C., & Steils, N. (2026). Rethinking How We Can Improve Information-sharing to Safeguard Children and Young People: Findings from a Multi-agency Roundtable. NIHR Policy Research Unit in Health and Social Care Workforce, The Policy Institute, King's College London. https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/rethinking-how-we-can-improve-information-sharing-to-safeguard-ch

For more information about this project, please contact: mary.baginsky@kcl.ac.uk

Every young person should have what they need to thrive now and in the future. Feeling safe where you live and close to people you care about is important to all of us. But young people with care experience often do not have enough support when they are leaving care.

A lot of research points out the difficulties some care leavers face when they move towards being adults. Government statistics show that care leavers are more likely to be homeless than other young people. But, care leavers are also good at working together, with each other and with adults, to try to create solutions to some of these situations.

Why is now a good time to do it?

The government is trying to encourage some of the changes that young people have been asking for. A future law is being talked about in parliament at the moment – the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. If parliament votes for the bill to become law, local authorities will have to tell everyone more about what they are doing to support care leavers as they become adults, including:

• Knowing how much accommodation is needed by care leavers now and in the future
• Helping care leavers find good accommodation
• Helping those who might become homeless.

The government has already said that young care leavers should be involved in local plans for care leavers accommodation. At the moment, social care staff have to report every year on whether each care leaver’s accommodation is suitable. But there is no national way of hearing directly form each care experienced young person about this.

Care leavers are getting involved in trying to improve housing. And now is a good time to find out what helps make sure that their ideas and energy are used to make things better.

This project is led by a team at ULAN.

We are planning an evaluation to gather evidence about ways of hearing directly from care leavers, and then care leavers and staff using this information to create improvements in housing.

We will try to understand

• what ways local authorities work to find out about the views of a large number of care experienced young people locally.
• how they involve care leavers in developing improvements.
• whether there is any evidence that the improvements make a difference for care leavers.

We are working with young people with care experience, they will help decide what we do. We will use ideas from staff in leaving care organisations and local authorities to help decide what we do. Some young people may become peer researchers.

We plan to contact six places across England. In each place we will ask to speak to 4 staff and to 4-8 young people. We will ask them questions about:

• gathering the views and experiences of care experienced young people
• using these ideas in coproduction or participatory activities
• understanding what has changed for care leavers

In six places we will offer adults opportunities to be interviewed. We will also read things that have already been written about the work in each area and look at any statistics that are available. Then in three of these places, that are really interesting, we will ask groups of young people to take part in creative activities to try to tell the story of what happened. Young people will decide what they do. But we will tell them that we are really interested in:

• how are things planned and put into action?
• what is different about the different places and people involved?
• Who has what power?
• How do things change over time?
• how do people of diverse identities experience all of this?

For more information about this project, please contact: ANRoy@lancashire.ac.uk

Many parents who get help from children’s social care have had very hard lives.
Some were hurt, ignored, or badly treated when they were young. These experiences are called trauma. Trauma can make it hard for parents to:

• control their feelings
• build safe and trusting relationships
• care for their children in a steady way.

Normal parenting courses are often too short or not strong enough to meet these families’ needs. Research shows that parents make bigger and longer-lasting changes when support:

• understands how bad experiences affect people (this is called trauma-informed)
• lasts for a longer time
• helps with both feelings and practical things like housing, money, and safety.

When families get this kind of help, fewer children need to go into care. This also saves money for local councils.

About the New Beginnings Programme

The research we are planning will find out about a programme called New Beginnings. It helps parents who are at risk of losing their children to care. It began in Stockport, based on an idea from Belgium. The programme gives families intensive support for 24 weeks.
Parents take part in:

• group therapy
• regular meetings with a keyworker
• one-to-one counselling.

They also do practical things such as learning to manage money, self-care, and creative activities.
Many parents in the programme have lived through domestic abuse, neglect, or family trauma. The programme helps parents face their past experiences, build confidence, and improve their parenting skills.
Research has already looked at New Beginnings in Stockport. The results were very positive:

• Parents felt more confident, safer, and better at understanding risks
• Families had stronger relationships and improved wellbeing
• Some parents later became peer mentors to support others
• The local council saved about £219,000 by preventing five children from going into foster care in one year.

Now, New Beginnings is being introduced in Tameside.
Tameside hopes this will:

• give families early and joined up help.
• improve the quality of social work
• build strong leadership
• keep staff
• make social workers’ jobs easier by reducing crisis situations.

For New Beginnings to succeed in Tameside, the programme must fit local needs while keeping the key parts that make it work. Good teamwork and research will help everyone understand what works, where, and why.

This project is led by a team at KCL.

The main aim is to learn how the New Beginnings programme can be successfully introduced in Tameside after being tested in Stockport.
We want to know how it is adapted for a new area and what difference it makes for families, workers, and services.
1. How the programme is put in place
2. Families’ experiences and outcomes
3. Impact on professionals and services
4. Service and cost implications
5. Learning for other areas

We will find out which parts of the programme are essential and which can be changed.

Evaluation Questions

We will answer these main questions:
1. How is the programme introduced and delivered in Tameside?
2. What difference does the programme make for families?
3. How does the programme affect professionals and services?
4. What are the service and cost implications?
5. What can be learned for other local authorities about how to adopt the model?

We will use interviews, focus groups, observations and local authority data to learn how New Beginnings is introduced in Tameside, how it works, and what difference it makes.
We will work with:

• Parents and carers taking part in New Beginnings
• Local leaders who are responsible for planning and services
• Practitioners and professionals (social workers, keyworkers, voluntary staff, and managers)

We will also look at information from the original Stockport programme to see what has changed or stayed the same.

For more information about this project, please contact: mary.baginsky@kcl.ac.uk

This study is looking at ‘co-located’ welfare and social care services for older people, where support for poverty and social care prevention are offered in the same place. There are many different types of co-located welfare and social care services, such as income maximisation staff in social work duty teams or social workers working closely with local food banks.

Why is this important?

The number of older people in poverty who are living in the UK is rising. Being poor can make it harder to live independently; it can also increase illness and disability. Yet, the link between poverty and care needs in later life has not been studied enough.

There is also increasing interest in prevention. Social care prevention is about trying to prevent, reduce or delay the development of social care needs. It is also about helping people to get earlier access to support and building strong communities.

Co-located welfare and social care services could be a good way of improving poverty and helping social care to be more preventative. There is little evidence about who is using these services, whether they are preventative, how they help to improve poverty and older people’s lives, and the conditions needed for success.

This project is led by a team at LSE.

We want to understand how different co-located welfare and social care services can help older people living in poverty. We also want to understand how they have preventative effects on social care outcomes. Understanding which types of co-located services work best for different communities and why will benefit older people, their carers, and their communities.

We will use a few different types of research methods to build a picture of how co-located welfare and social care services for older people improve poverty and are preventative (a theory of change). We will work with at least two sites (local areas within regions of England).

• We will use mapping tools and publicly available information to identify potential co-located services in the two sites, find out where these services are most needed and identify where there are gaps.
• At the organisational level, we will develop our understanding of how different co-located services in diverse areas across England operate. These methods will involve observing how the services operate and talking to staff, managers and partnering organisations about their experiences.
• We will also find out which groups of older people are attending co-located services and how they think they help them. This will involve surveying and interviewing older people who use co-located services. The interviews will ask about how they experience support, whether it affects their financial situation, and whether it influences their care needs.

For more information about this project, please contact Sarah Jasim: S.Jasim@lse.ac.uk

Public services, including adult social care, want to focus more on prevention. This means helping people earlier so they can stay independent and avoid crises. Local councils often find this difficult because of money pressures, unclear benefits, and not knowing the best way to do it. The Future of Prevention Programme was set up to help councils work with older people preventatively at scale. They have developed a new way of doing this, and are trying it out with older people at risk of falls. SOCRATES has been asked to find out how best to evaluate the Programme.

This project is led by KCL, involving SOCRATES researchers from across all three partner universities.

We will look at:

• What past studies say about evaluating prevention and digital tools.
• What data is available to measure the Programme’s impact and where the gaps are.
• How different groups (local councils, national organisations, Programme partners) understand the Programme and what success looks like.
• What options there are for a future evaluation of the Future of Prevention and similar programmes.

Aims and Objectives

Our aim is to find the best way to evaluate the Programme, and especially its impact and value for money. We will:

• Review what is already known about evaluating similar programmes.
• Work with stakeholders to agree goals and outcomes.
• Develop a clear “theory of change” showing how the Programme is expected to work.
• Identify what data is needed and whether it is available.
• Set out options for a future evaluation and check they are acceptable to stakeholders.
• Develop greater awareness among social care policy colleagues of possibilities and challenges for meaningful evaluation of similar initiatives.

We will use three main approaches:

• Document review: We will look at Programme documents and past studies.
• Interviews: We will talk to local councils, Programme leads, policymakers and evaluation experts.
• Workshops: We will run sessions with public advisors and delivery partners to agree outcomes, measures, and evaluation options.

For more information about this project, please contact Juliette Malley: juliette.malley@kcl.ac.uk