Next steps in implementing the Rees Centre strategy

As a new recruit to the Rees Centre, I’ve joined at an exciting time. We have recently published our 5 Year Strategy for 2024-2029 and have been collaborating as a team to design new ways of working that will put our ambitions into practice.  

The Centre is unique in specialising in how the education and children’s social care systems can (separately and together) better support children and young people who are supported by local authority children’s services to have stronger and more stable relationships, better educational outcomes and better lives.    

We identified 5 strategic objectives that will help us achieve our mission of producing high quality and relevant research and evidence that enables practitioners, policymakers and the research community to understand and improve children’s social care and education.  

1. To increase the academic output from our work so that we contribute fully to the theoretical and empirical scholarship needed to understand the particular needs of children and young people supported by children’s social care, and to test approaches which might better respond to those needs. 
2. To work with practice communities in education to develop and deliver research studies which respond to the challenges they face and lead to improvements in the educational experience and outcomes of care-experienced children and young people.  
3. To work with practice communities in children’s social care – including foster carers, kinship carers and adoptive parents – to develop and deliver research studies which lead to practice improvements to achieve stronger and more stable relationships, and improved lives for children and young people supported by these services. 
4. To work with national and local policy makers and ‘evidence intermediary’ organisations to identify and address the systemic barriers and enablers to improving the experiences and outcomes of care-experienced children. 
5. To make the Rees Centre a welcoming, stimulating and supportive place for its partners – staff, academics at Oxford and beyond, communities of practice and most of all the young people and their families/carers we exist to help – to share and contribute to learning and ideas for the future.   

As a first step, we have established Priority Working Groups to take stock of our existing work in education and children’s social care, and identify a forward research agenda that we can discuss and refine with all our partners through a combination of policy briefs, webinars and interactive events. These working groups are already generating exciting research ideas within the Centre and areas for collaboration with our academic colleagues in the Department of Education and beyond Oxford.    

But at the heart of the Rees Centre approach is a commitment to ensuring the design and delivery of our research is shaped by active involvement of children and young people who have experience of the children’s social care services, and the input from the practitioners and carers who support them. We are thinking hard about ways we can better engage with these groups to help shape our research agenda on an ongoing basis. But in the meantime, if you have ideas for research you would like to see us develop or for practice innovations that need testing, please do get in touch with Leon Feinstein for ideas in education leon.feinstein@education.ox.ac.uk; or Teresa Williams for ideas in children’s social care Teresa.williams@education.ox.ac.uk.     

It is already clear that we will need additional research and management capacity to enable us to achieve all we have set out to do. We are in the fortunate position of having the resources to expand our team and are currently hiring to three posts: a Senior Academic Research Lead in Children’s Social Care, a Research Fellow specialising in statistical analysis of children’s social care administrative data on children’s social care and education; and a Centre Manager to keep us all on track and help promote our work. 

Please consider whether you, or anyone you know, would be interested to join us – You can find further details on our website. I know from experience this is a welcoming, committed and intellectually stimulating team to be a part of! 

Teresa Williams 

Senior Research Fellow (impact and translation)