Evaluation of Birmingham Children’s Trust Supporting Families/Think Family Service: working with families where domestic violence and abuse is present

In the Executive Summary we summarise how the domestic violence and abuse service provided by Birmingham Children’s Trust (hereafter the Trust) meets (or does not meet) the evaluation criteria as laid out in the OECD Evaluation Framework (2022) and highlight issues of relevance, coherence, effectiveness, impact and sustainability. The service began under a government agenda originally known as Think Family and was later renamed as Supporting Families with an underlying approach focussed on meeting the various needs of families predominantly in the Early Help space. Grant funding came directly from central government and was/is based on the previous year utilising a “payment by results” or positive outcomes model. The Supporting Families grant is distributed across all types of need, including children in need, parental conflict, health needs, educational needs, substance use, neglect, etc. Some of the grant within the Trust is used for funding the specialist commissioned services for Domestic Violence and Abuse (DVA); thus, the services being evaluated are those funded under the Supporting Families, for DVA provision rather than the service being a Think Family service. For simplicity and clarity throughout this report we will refer to the service as the Supporting Families/Think Family Service, as many respondents use the original terminology.