Policy paper

Office of the Children’s Commissioner’s Family Review: terms of reference

Published 18 August 2022

Applies to England

Terms of reference of the Office of the Children’s Commissioner’s Family Review (agreed between the Minister for Supporting Families and Children’s Commissioner in February 2022)

Background

In July 2020, the Prime Minister established the independent Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (‘the Commission’). It was tasked with carrying out a deep examination into why disparities exist and considering how to reduce them. The Commission published its findings on 31 March 2021, making 24 recommendations focused on health, education, crime and policing and employment. Recommendation 19 set out that the government should undertake a review to investigate and take action to address the underlying issues facing families.

The government’s response to the Commission, Inclusive Britain, was published on 17 March 2022. It presents a ground-breaking action plan to tackle negative disparities, promote unity and build a fairer Britain for all. Action 25 of the plan set out that the Children’s Commissioner for England will lead a review to improve the way public services understand the needs of children and families, so every child has the best start in life and the opportunity to reach their full potential.

The Children’s Commissioner for England

The Children’s Commissioner for England is a statutory position established under the Children Act 2004. The primary function of the office is to ‘promote and protect children’s interests and rights’. In short, the Commissioner exists to understand the perspective of children within society, and particularly in relation to the state, and champion the interests of children within government. The Commissioner describes this as seeing ‘children not departments’ and in taking this holistic approach is using the perspective of children to improve the public services they access, in turn improving their experiences, opportunities and outcomes.

In discharging her primary function, the Children’s Commissioner may ‘advise the Secretary of State on the rights, views and interests of children’. This work would be undertaken under this provision.

The Children’s Commissioner has conducted ‘The Big Ask’, the largest ever survey of children with over half a million responses, from every part of the country. One of the key themes coming out of this was how much children care about their family and how this was particularly evident in the pandemic. Children believe in family. Not just the nuclear family – families of all kinds. Simply, they want stable and happy homes. Alongside this 80% of children were happy with their family lives. The were some children who asked for more support with their family life. Now, moving forward the Children’s Commissioner’s Office will look to understand more about children and parents’ perspectives about family life.

Approach and methodology

The unique approach of the Children’s Commissioner is to adopt the child’s perspective in evaluating policy and practice. For the purpose of this review, the Commissioner will apply this approach to the family. It will build upon, and not repeat, research undertaken by the Commission.

The Children’s Commissioner’s approach will be to seek to understand all children and families’ perspective on the support they are offered by public and voluntary services. In particular, she will seek to ask whether public services understand the needs of a family as a unit, rather than as a collection of individuals.

One of the key conclusions of the Commission was that the support offered to a family does make a big difference to the outcomes for children. The Commissioner’s review will seek to understand whether the needs of children within families are understood in the provision of services to families and how we could improve children’s outcomes by improving the way public services understand the needs of families.

Methodology

In undertaking the review the Commissioner will employ a range of research approaches, several utilising her unique powers and access to datasets. This approach will enable the Commissioner to answer 4 fundamental questions around which the review will be based (see below).

• The Big Ask gave access to the largest ever survey of children, whilst top line findings on family are available, we will undertake a deep-dive into the responses of more than 550,000 children, including more than 250,000 free text responses. We will link our quantitative data to the free text responses to carry out a mixed methods analysis which will provide us with valuable additional insights. This offers unparalleled insight into children’s views of family.
• Alongside this we will engage with children and families from different backgrounds and locations across England, to understand their lives and what they value in family life. This will be an outward facing project which will frame and discuss with families the support available and understand how aware families are and how they respond to this. We are able to look at families’ experiences, how they seek and gain support and understand how familial breakdown and/or children requiring interventions from children’s services. We have strong expertise in designing and running qualitative research, such as focus groups, with children and their families. We will make sure the sample we use is representative of the ethnic make-up of the UK.
• The Children’s Commissioner has statutory and unique data-gathering powers, and under these provisions has a number of data-sharing agreements in place across national government (including the Department for Education and Department for Work and Pensions), local government and other public services (including NHS Digital). We also worked closely with the major cohort studies, panel surveys (such as the Family Resources Survey) and government administrative data (including the National Pupil Database, School Census and the Children in Need Census). This enables the linking of data in unique and innovative ways to explore the attitudes, experiences and outcomes of children and families to answer the review’s key questions (see below). This would also allow us to compare local and regional differences, as well as differences by income and protected characteristics. We will be able to carry out multi-variate analysis, using the linked data, to investigate complex relationships and interactions of different factors and indicators.
• Analyse the impacts of existing policy on children and family life with a particular focus on the impact of existing government commitments in this area and the potential for the government offer to families to be improved by improving the connections between these policy areas.^{[footnote 1]}
• Examine the evidence for ‘what works’ in terms of providing support for families. We will look at the support that is in place for families and how they interact with it, how they experience it and what they think works from it. We will engage with the national what works centres to consider gaps between evidence and practice. All this will be informed by the data-analysis.

Resource

• 4 FTE: 1 G7 analyst, with experience of linking and analysing large datasets and 1 SEO researcher, 1 policy SEO and 1 HEO project coordinator.
• The first report will be completed in the autumn and the review will be completed by spring 2023.

Outputs

From the evidence collated we would look to produce a report capturing children’s and families’ voices – viewing the unit as a whole, not as a group of individuals. It will consider how we can better understand and respond to the needs of families. The report will seek to answer 3 key questions:

1. What is children’s perspective on family life, what do children think and feel about family and does this change depending on their ethnic background?
2. Do public services understand the needs of families as units of people, and is this the experience of children and their families?
3. What opportunities are there to improve the support the state provides to families. Considering:

a. How can we improve the experiences of families seeking support for the issues that routinely cause family breakdown?

b. What would be the most effective ways of working with families in order to improve children’s outcomes?

The approach will be a ‘problem solving’ one. Seeking to provide innovative and pragmatic solutions to address the issues raised by the research. Recommendations, where necessary, will be made across the public sector. But this will not just be about the role of government, it will also consider the importance of family within society, and how collectively we can address the issues raised.

1. Including, but not limited to, Family Support Fund (Department for Work and Pensions), the introduction of Family Hubs (Department for Education), the Supporting Families Programme (Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities) and the Maternity Transformation Programme (NHS England). ↩