Welcome to Cascade
CASCADE’s aim is to improve the well-being, safety and rights of children and their families.
We are concerned with all aspects of community responses to social need in children and families, including family support services, children in need services, child protection, looked after children and adoption.
What we do
- Generate internationally recognised primary research evidence
- Make our research accessible to all; including people who use services, professionals and policymakers.
- Develop social care research capacity in Wales by providing opportunities for researchers from undergraduate through to senior career stages.
- Engage a range of collaborators in research, including children and young people, parents and carers, practitioners, policymakers and social care providers from the public, private and third sectors.
How we do it
- The only centre of its kind in Wales – promoting evidence, improving outcomes
- A diverse range of research methods – Ethnography, interviews and focus groups, cohort and routine data sets, quasi-experiments, randomised controlled trials and reviews (rapid, systematic and realist)
- Strong links with policy and practice – Parents and children, social workers and senior managers, government (Welsh and UK) and the third sector
- Grant funding from a range of sources – research councils, government and the third sector
Introducing our partnership work
In 2020 CASCADE was delighted to receive infrastructure funding to develop our partnership with the Centres for Trials Research and Human Developmental Science at Cardiff University and Swansea University’s Secure Anonymised Information Linkage Centre. The funding allowed us to develop new ideas for research projects, engage the sector with our research and involve children, young people and parents in our work.
Our Annual Report provides an overview of some of our key achievements.