Mapping out data to increase family courts transparency

Family Drug and Alcohol Courts (FDACs) offer an alternative to standard care proceedings involving parental drug or alcohol misuse, using a “problem-solving” approach to justice to support parents to reduce their misuse issues. The primary aim is to improve outcomes for children and families, ensuring that children can either live safely with parents at the end of care proceedings or, where reunification is not possible, have the best chance for permanency and stability outside the family home. FDACs also aim to reduce the risk of families re-entering care proceedings at a later date.
The National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) were commissioned to assess and understand the impact of FDAC and to assess how FDAC has been implemented to date in England. The evaluation was commissioned by Foundations and was part of the Department for Education’s Supporting Families: Investing in Practice programme.
The evaluation comprised two strands:
We were able to match on child and primary carer demographics, primary carer experiences of domestic abuse and their current misuse of drugs or alcohol. However, due to challenges obtaining data, it was not possible to match on the following covariates that we know are very likely to be important: primary carer’s mental health diagnoses, their severity of drug and alcohol misuse, and their stated motivation to abstain from alcohol and drug use. The findings from this evaluation were indicative of positive (statistically significant) effects of FDAC on the outcomes of interest.
We found:
Overall, there was a strong sense that FDAC was meeting IPE participants’ expectations. Comparing FDAC with the process for standard care proceedings, participants highlighted three inter-related benefits:
Two key facilitators of perceived positive outcomes for families were:
The impact of FDAC was assessed through a quasi-experimental design (QED), using coarsened exact matching to generate a matched comparison group. It compared data on families in FDAC care proceedings drawn from 13 FDAC sites with similar families in standard care proceeding. Information from nine different local authorities (LAs) was used to construct the control groups. All these LAs have FDAC care proceedings operated within the area, except for Manchester. In all cases (both FDAC and standard care proceedings), parental substance misuse was the key factor in the application for care proceedings.
IPE findings are based on 40 interviews that were undertaken with a broad range of stakeholders, including FDAC leads, support staff, members of the judiciary and parents from FDAC; as well as leads and members of the judiciary from non-FDACs. The interviews were completed across six FDAC sites with diversity across key characteristics (operational timeframe, caseload, number of local authorities served, geographic setting and types of cases) and four non-FDACs to enable comparisons to be drawn.
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