Evaluation of Signs of Safety in 10 pilots

Children’s Social Care Innovation Programme Evaluation Report 48

Signs of Safety (SoS) is a strengths-based approach to child protection casework that was developed in Western Australia in the 1990s but has since been adopted in other jurisdictions across North America, Australasia and Europe. The Munro, Turnell and Murphy Child Protection Consulting (MTM) ‘Transforming children’s services with Signs of Safety at the centre’ project was designed to achieve whole-system change in 10 pilot local authorities in England by establishing supportive organisational cultures, including the commitment of those in senior leadership positions, to the SoS practice framework. Although a number of research studies into SoS have been conducted in different countries, this study provides the most comprehensive and rigorous independent evaluation of SoS practice conducted in England, and possibly elsewhere.
Pilot authorities
The 10 authorities taking part in the study included those in urban and rural settings, and county council as well as metropolitan, London and unitary authorities. Their Ofsted judgements ranged from ‘good’ through to ‘inadequate’. Some had up to 4 years’ prior experience of SoS, while others had none. Towards the end of the project, and after consultation with the pilots, we divided them into 3 groups, broadly aligning with their prior experiences of SoS at the start of the project in autumn 2014:

  • beginners with either no previous experience or up to one year’s experience – Wakefield, Norfolk, Wokingham, Bristol (‘new’ grouping)
  • two years’ experience – Suffolk, Lincolnshire, London Borough of Brent (‘2 year’ grouping)
  • more than 2 years’ experience – West Sussex, Leicestershire, London Borough of Tower Hamlets (‘2+ years’ grouping)

Evaluation – questions and methods
The evaluation sought to address 3 main questions:

  • how is SoS delivered?
  • what are the outcomes for children and young people?
  • what are the costs of implementing SoS across children’s social care?

Findings
From the local authorities: strategic response
Managers and social workers in the 10 pilots were overwhelmingly positive about the benefits of SoS as a practice framework. Implementation challenges included recruitment and retention of social workers, high levels of referrals, constraints on budgets and reorganisations. However, they were optimistic that maintaining SoS would, in the long term, help to address these challenges and strengthen the service they provided to families. There was evidence that SoS was being more widely applied over the timescale of the project but the advances were not always linear, particularly where reorganisations were happening at the same time.