Final Report: Identifying and understanding the link between system conditions and welfare inequalities in children’s social care services

This report presents the findings from a study examining how the organisational and institutional context of statutory children’s social care (CSC) in England contributes to patterns of inequality in the delivery of services. It builds on work carried out by the Child Welfare Inequalities Project (CWIP, also funded by the Nuffield Foundation), which found strong evidence that a child’s chances of being subject of a child protection plan or being in public care differs greatly according to indicators of social disadvantage (Bywaters et al., 2018). Other work carried out by Hood et al. (2016a) found that the increasing use of child protection interventions to address demand for child welfare services intersected with deprivation-related differences in intervention rates as well as Ofsted inspection outcomes. The research reported on here builds on the implications of these two studies, focusing on the link between system conditions and welfare inequalities.