Foundations: New Reunification Practice Guide
Reunification can be a pivotal transition for children, young people, and their families. A return home is not a single event: it is a process that requires careful assessment, purposeful planning, shared decision-making, and sustained support before, during, and after a child returns home.
Effective reunification support can help to:
- Support children and young people to return home safely and remain safely at home over time
- Strengthen parenting capacity, family relationships and day-to-day family functioning
- Address the difficulties and adversities that contributed to a child entering care
- Improve children’s, young people’s and parents’ emotional wellbeing and confidence
- Build practical, emotional and community support around families
- Reduce the likelihood of reunification breakdown and re-entry into care.
The Guide’s four recommendations summarise the best-evidenced approaches for strengthening reunification support for children, young people and their families. The recommendations are mainly drawn from robust impact evaluations of interventions and approaches sourced via the systematic review.
Click here to access the summary online version of the Reunification Practice Guide
Click here to access the Full Reunification Practice Guide
This Guide relates predominantly to Outcomes 1, 3 and 4 of the Children’s Social Care National Framework: families stay together and get the help they need; children are supported by their family network; and children in care and care leavers have stable, loving homes. The enablers of the National Framework — leadership, workforce, and multi-agency working — have an important role in supporting the delivery of this Guide’s key principles and recommendations.
This Guide should be considered alongside the Children’s Social Care National Framework, Working Together to Safeguard Children, and local policies and procedures for care planning, safeguarding, Family Help and corporate parenting.
