Keeping more children safely at home: System dynamics in social care
Public system reform | Service design
Derbyshire County Council, Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council, North Tyneside Council, and Blackpool Council
We are using system dynamics to help local authorities get to grips with the system behaviours operating within their children’s social care services, to help improve policy, process and practice, and ultimately keep more children safely at home with their families.
The need
Local authority children’s services are experiencing severe cuts in funding in the face of rising demand and increased placement costs. Such a context is making it harder to provide children at the high and lower ends of need with the right support in and out of the care system. Rising numbers of children in care overall but significant variation at local authority level point to the need for a systems approach which embraces complexity and shines a light on some of the negative system behaviours currently operating.
Our response
We harness staff system insights to understand the problem behaviours currently operating in Derbyshire, Stockton-on-Tees, North Tyneside, and Blackpool local authority children’s services and use group model building techniques to develop system dynamics simulation models. These aid senior decision-makers in service design and re-design. We combine these systems methods with evidence-informed practice tools and rapid literature reviews to help our partner authorities better manage the flow of children through their social care systems and provide better services for children and their families.
The work is commissioned by four local authority partners in England: Derbyshire County Council, Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council, North Tyneside Council, and Blackpool Council. We are supported in the work by our expert partners in the U.S, the Social System Design Lab, part of the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, led by Professor Peter Hovmand.
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