Improving social care systems and practices for safeguarding young people at complex risk: what promotes and sustains innovation?

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A key challenge for children's social care is how to improve service experiences and outcomes for some of the most vulnerable members of our society in the face of complex social problems, increased demand for services, greater public accountability and pressure on public spending. Incremental improvement to traditional service systems and structures is not always sufficient to address intractable issues, such as child sexual exploitation, which are resistant to any clear-cut, unidimensional or standardised remedies. Innovation is increasingly being mooted as a way of fundamentally rethinking the nature of such practice problems and transforming (often radically) the ways that services are structured and delivered. This incurs substantial investment of resource, but not enough is yet understood about the conditions, factors and processes that will allow innovation to flourish and sustain over time and to be diffused effectively. Opportunities to address gaps and deficiencies in social care provision, therefore, are not being maximised and it cannot be assumed that social investment provides best value for money. Our four year collaborative project will address this gap in knowledge, providing invaluable insight into the stages of innovation over time, and identifying what practice or system innovations require to maximise their potential for addressing service objectives, improving experiences and outcomes for young people and families, and achieving value for money. The processes of innovation can only be studied in context, so we will investigate how six social care organisations or networks across the UK have innovated in practice services or systems to address the 'complex safeguarding' risks that vulnerable young people face at the intersection of their family, peer, social and environmental contexts, such as exploitation and gang association. More specifically, we will scrutinise how the six sites have interpreted and operationalised one of three flexible conceptual frameworks which allow for nuanced and situated innovation to address complex safeguarding risks: Trauma-Informed Practice, Contextual Safeguarding or Transitional Safeguarding. The detailed scrutiny of our multi-method case study design will enable us to uncover the various stages of innovation in real time, within organisations and systems, and in their varied cultural, geographical and regulatory contexts. Existing theories of innovation will be tested and scrutinised critically alongside theories of organisational development and change management, and systemic and psychosocial theories, to create new cross-disciplinary understandings which could then have relevance to wider innovation practice. Any evidence of improved outcomes, positive service user experience and cost-efficiency associated with these innovations will be established. Circles of engagement and influence with a wider group of social care organisations, in the UK and overseas, will allow emergent findings to be tested in more diverse contexts, and to generate and capture impact.Our project will inform the development of future innovation, both in complex safeguarding and in social care and public services more broadly. Our findings will lead to the development of a critical sociology of complex safeguarding and a practice model that: collaborates with young people and families as partners; supports practitioners and services in assessing and addressing peer, environmental, individual and familial risks; ensures the impact of trauma on young people and practitioners is understood and mitigated; and respects young people's support and protection needs alongside their rights to autonomy, privacy, and voice. A comprehensive programme of engagement, knowledge exchange and impact generation with communities of practice, engagement and interest will diffuse findings and provide evidence of benefit to stakeholders.