This report presents the findings from a study of the organisational and institutional context of statutory children’s social care (CSC) in England and its contribution to inequalities in provision. It builds on work carried out by the Child Welfare Inequalities Project (CWIP, also funded by the Nuffield Foundation), which found strong evidence that a child’s chances of being subject of a child protection plan or being in public care differs greatly according to indicators of social disadvantage (Bywaters et al., 2018). Other work carried out by Hood et al. (2016a) found that the rise in demand for child protection intersected with deprivation-related differences in rates of intervention. This research builds on the inequalities agenda established by CWIP, focusing on system conditions in CSC.
