Following on from three pilot studies which showed evidence of promise, the SWIS trial evaluated the programme on a larger scale to establish the impact it had on some important social care and educational outcomes. We also learnt more about how the intervention works and how it varies.
Overview
Education and Children’s Social Care (CSC) have an important inter-agency relationship, and both play a vital role in keeping children safe and promoting their wellbeing. Policymakers have been increasingly interested in finding ways to improve how education and CSC work together to respond to safeguarding concerns and protect children, and in the context of Covid-19 these efforts are likely to intensify.
SWIS was a promising approach to doing this. The central idea was that having a social worker linked to and based within a secondary school can have a range of benefits. In particular, to improve the service delivered to children and families, enhance interagency working, reduce risks to children and lead to better outcomes.
Activities and Methods
Social workers worked within schools across 21 Local Authorities (LAs) in England. The study evaluated the impact of the programme by comparing outcomes between schools that have a social worker and those that continue as normal, without a social worker based on the premises. Schools were selected randomly from a pool of schools put forward by LAs to receive a social worker, so that we could be confident any differences we observed were due to the intervention and not another difference between the groups.
The primary outcome we tested were Child Protection (Section 47) enquiries, but we also analysed other social care and educational outcomes to see what impact the intervention had on these. The study also included an economic evaluation, which calculated the costs of SWIS, and an implementation and process component which explored how and why the intervention works as it does.
Findings
The SWIS main report was published in January 2023, along with a short Domestic Abuse report, exploring examples of practice which feature domestic abuse and an exploration of the knowledge, attitudes, and practices of school staff around this issue. A final follow-up report was published in January 2024.
Reports
Outputs
Contact
If you have any general enquiries about this project please email: SWISTrial@cardiff.ac.uk
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Lead Person
| Principal Investigator | David Westlake |
Academic Staff
| Researcher | Dr. James White |
| Researcher | Prof. Donald Forrester |
| Researcher | Dr. Philip Pallmann |
| Researcher | Dr. Fiona Lugg-Widger |
| Researcher | Prof. Stavros Petrou, University of Oxford |
Related Information
| Related Schools | Cardiff University – School of Medicine |
| Related partners | Cardiff University – Centre for Trials Research University of Oxford – Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences |
| Funders | What Works for Children’s Social Care |
| Related Documents | Trial Evaluation Protocol -The SWIS Trial |