Our research themes

Our vision

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.

Our research themes

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.

We will continue to develop our themes through policy mapping, consultation across members, our public and practice engagement networks and with representatives from our advisory board over the life of the School.