The What Works Centre for Social Care launches new initiative to improve the quality of children's services in England

What Works Centre for Social Care initiative is teaming up with 21 pioneer councils to test new approaches and identify some "fast wins" to improve the quality of children's services in England

 Sir Alan Wood, the founding chair of the What Works Centre for Social Care said the "pioneer councils" will help it to identify promising areas for further research as well as design and test new services and products that could support quality social work.

 The 21 councils will work with the centre until December this year on the following five initiatives:

• The design of digital tools with the aim of improving the use of social care data in decision making.
• Examining the potential of online peer-to-peer networking as way of giving social workers greater access to quality-assured advice.
• The design of a diagnostic tool that assesses how well children's social care departments use evidence in their practice.
• The development and testing of a self-evaluation toolkit that could allow services to monitor the impact of their own social care projects.
• Building evidence on promising social care interventions and identifying areas for further research.

Wood commented, "These initial partnerships will help and support local leaders and practitioners to ensure that we most effectively meet the needs of children and families. The whole idea is to get some fast wins - some quick information about things that might be full of potential for delivery to bring about change or are achieving change by using quite different methods of work with young people, work with families, supervision of staff, etc.,".