The School for Social Care Research, funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), formally began work in May 2009 and is now in its fourth five-year phase. Our core vision is to strengthen the evidence base for adult social care practice, building capacity and driving the development of a research system in practice which can support mobilise, and deliver impact on practice and for the benefit of the public as service users, carers and the workforce.
Membership
Phase I (2009–2014) involved the London School of Economics and Political Science (Lead), King’s College London and the Universities of Kent, Manchester and York.
Phase II (2014–2019) involved the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Universities of Bristol, Kent, Manchester and York.
Phase III (2019-2024) involved the London School of Economics and Political Science (Lead), King’s College London and the Universities of Birmingham, Bristol, Kent, Manchester and York.
Phase IV (2024-2029) members are the Universities of Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield and York (Lead), a collaboration between the University of Leeds and Leeds Beckett University and The London School of Economics and Political Science.
Mission
The School’s mission in Phase IV continues to commission and conduct internationally leading social care research to improve the evidence base for effective and equitable practice and to support the translation of evidence into practice
In pursuit of this mission, we aim to create an environment where excellent applied social care research, focused on the needs of the practice and the public can thrive. Practitioners, policy colleagues, and public stakeholders will engage with research from the earliest planning stages through to delivery, dissemination, and application. We aim to bridge the divide between academics and practitioners and to support practitioners in the understanding, use and generation of high-quality research evidence to inform their decisions by making our outputs practical, relevant, accessible and timely and by nurturing long-term, mutually respectful relationships of knowledge and skills exchange.
Thematic Priorities
The School’s research programme will cover the following key thematic areas in this context of adult social care (in no priority order).
- Supporting choice and control for people to live flourishing lives: evaluation of feasibility, quality, impact and effectiveness of existing and new models of support.
- Adult social care needs (met and unmet), and prevention in its broadest sense.
- Digital and other new technologies.
- The adult social care workforce: recruitment and retention; workforce development, skills, and training; roles development and new ways of working; challenges including equality and diversity.
- Care resources management and allocation: eligibility; assessment; innovative approaches to funding; equality and value across self- and state-funded services; financial pressures facing adults needing support and their families.
- Supporting carers and volunteers.
- Communities and local area networks to promote well-being; including asset-based approaches, social prescribing; community and individual capability; personalisation; interdependency.
- Care systems and markets: local authorities management of volume and quality in local services/markets; market-shaping and the impact on providers and others; impact of major changes (e.g. legislation/policy) to systems of care; the impact of coproduced service provision.
- Diversity, inequality and communities/populations less well represented in research: covering areas such as variations in accessing adult social care; promising practice and support for specific user groups; coproducing solutions to challenge inequality.
- Adult social care at the interface with other systems.
- Appropriate development and utilisation of robust outcome measures of interest to commissioners, managers, staff, people who use services and their carers where gaps are identified.
- Analysis of cost-effectiveness of models and intervention: ensuring that resource impacts are addressed alongside outcome impacts, and that any trade-offs are transparent.
- Using routinely collected social care data and development of analytic tools and infrastructure for service planning, policy making, identifying inequalities, and measuring outcomes.
- Understanding the acceptability of using individual social care records for these purposes from user, carer, family member and professional perspectives.
- Anticipating the future: new and emerging priorities.
