The Children and Families theme examines how inequalities and social harms become ‘care’ and ‘protection’ concerns for children — and how support can be redesigned to strengthen families and improve outcomes. We examine how families experience services across early help, Child in Need support, child protection, kinship care and out-of-home care, and how pathways through systems shape children’s safety, wellbeing and life chances.

A key conceptual anchor for the theme is the social model of child protection. This perspective challenges approaches that emphasise individual parental deficits, and instead asks how structural and systemic conditions—poverty, insecure housing, racism, unequal access to support, and wider service pressures—shape family life and children’s safety. It shifts attention towards prevention, early help, and relational, rights-respecting practice: support rather than surveillance, and a clearer focus on the root causes of harm. 

Across the theme, we ask:

• How do inequalities shape professional thresholds, decisions and interventions? For example, when and how are the impacts of hardship and adversity interpreted as “neglect”, and with what consequences for children and families? 
• What helps families stay safely together? Which combinations of early support reduce avoidable escalation into statutory intervention, and how can services respond earlier without becoming more intrusive or punitive? 
• Why do experiences and outcomes vary so widely between areas? Why do similar families experience different thresholds, pathways and outcomes in different local areas—and what can be learned from local variation and local system design? 
• What evidence is needed to support learning and accountability in children’s social care? How can better use of linked data, and stronger public involvement, support improvement in practice and policy? 

This agenda is reflected in two current NIHR-funded studies (in partnership with the University of Liverpool and Liverpool City Council): 

• our Three Schools Prevention Programme project on preventing care entry through a better understanding of “neglect”
• and our Practitioner Evaluation Scheme study of the Family Safeguarding Model in Liverpool and how it can better integrate anti-poverty support. 

Our work intends to shift public understanding, strengthen professional practice, and contribute to policy debate on how we support and protect children and families. We do this by translating research into accessible, partner-facing outputs that can be used in real-world settings, as is evident in our past projects; for example:

• Safeguarding Futures (with the Centre for Justice Innovation) sets out practical, cross-system recommendations for reducing criminal justice involvement among children in contact with social care.
• Through our partnership with Kinship, Valuing Kinship Care in England highlights the £4.3 billion per year contributed by kinship carers through their care for over 132,000 children. By emphasising the scale and value of kinship care, we shine a light on the unevenness of current support and strengthen the evidence base for a policy and practice agenda focused on improving local support.

Alongside these funded projects, this theme supports a growing community of doctoral research addressing diverse topics—including fostering and out-of-home care experiences, young carers and support systems, and safeguarding processes in urgent and emergency care settings. We welcome enquiries from other potential doctoral students.