What Works Centre for Children & Families
Generating and championing actionable evidence that improves services to support family relationships
This organisation is being formed by a merger between two others: the Early Intervention Foundation (EIF) and the What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care (CSC). More about their merger is here. Both organisations are registered charities. Both are part of the UK Government’s network of “What Works” centres, which aim to improve the way that government and other organisations create, share and use high-quality evidence in decision-making.
The Early Intervention Foundation focuses on children and young people who are at risk of poor outcomes (in health, education, future employment etc.). The idea is to use an evidence-based approach to identify those children and young people, and to prevent problems occurring, or to tackle them when they do, before they deteriorate.
Early intervention focuses on supporting children’s physical, cognitive, behavioural, and social and emotional development, on the basis that this is where it can make the biggest difference and can provide life-long benefits.
The What Works Centre on Children’s Social Care focuses on the children’s social care sector in England, and aims to improve outcomes for children, young people and families by bringing the best available evidence to practitioners and other decision-makers. It draws on the global evidence base.
How they work
How do they get their evidence?
EIF synthesises the evidence from existing scientific studies, tests and evaluations of early intervention programmes and practices, and the expertise and experiences of people working in early intervention. The research which EIF uses can be from any country. EIF does not commission or run primary trials. Once EIF has syntheses of the existing evidence on a particular topic, it works with government and all levels of the early intervention sector to ensure that the evidence and insights are used to inform strategy and implementation, from national policy to local strategy to frontline practice.
WWC CSC similarly collates, synthesises and reviews existing evidence about what works, and where there are gaps in the evidence, can get new evidence through trials and evaluations. It develops tools and services that support the greater use of evidence, and champions the application of robust standards of evidence in children’s social care research. CSC also does not commission or run primary trials.
How do they assess impact?
For each intervention which the EIF or CSC assesses, they publish: a rating of how effective they find the intervention to be; a rating showing the strength of that evidence (ie., how confident one can be in it); and the evidence that they used to form that view. Each recommendation on The Good Giving List which comes from EIF or CSC includes a link to the relevant evidence summary. This is the best place to start if you want to understand more about how it was tested.
Much more detail about our selection criteria and method are here.