Comparing placement options to meet children and young people's current and future needs: Strategic Briefing (2017)

Introduction

This briefing is aimed primarily at strategic leaders and decision-makers in public family law. It will also be of interest to legal teams and to frontline managers and their staff. It sets out key messages from an evidence review commissioned by the Department for Education (Wilkinson and Bowyer, 2017), the aim of which was to provide judicial and local authority decision-makers with an independent summary of research evidence on comparative outcomes of different placement options.

The full review brought together an accessible summary of key research findings on two themes:

• The impacts of abuse and neglect on children.
• The strengths and weaknesses of different types of long-term placements in relation to their impact on children.

This briefing focuses on the second of these themes, to help decision-makers think about how they can influence and organise local policy development and services to meet the current and future needs of children and young people. It is important to note that this is a summary of a summary; readers are encouraged to look to the full report, as well as the original source studies, for more detailed information.