On Thursday 5th October CASCADE Research Associate Dr Eleanor Staples, and Voices from Care Cymru member and CASCADE Peer Researcher Jenny Coleman attended the Health and Care Research Wales Conference 2017 to receive their Public Involvement Achievement Award 2017. The award is to recognise and celebrate excellent public involvement from across Health and Care Research Wales.

The CASCADE case study submitted to the award panel was that of the 2015 Looked After Children and Education project, carried out by CASCADE in collaboration with Voices from Care Cymru. The project, led by Dr Dawn Mannay, involved training care-experienced peer researchers, and using creative research methods to find out about the educational experiences and aspirations of care-experienced children and young people in Wales. The findings from the project were detailed in 17 recommendations to Welsh Government and were incorporated in to the Welsh Government Strategy for Looked After Children Education. Following the initial project, further impact acceleration work has been funded by the ESRC and ExChange: Care and Education has been developed as an online ‘community of practice’ resource hub.

You can find out more about CASCADE Voices and their work on the CASCADE website, which includes this short video about the group.