A framework for designing and improving responses

Taken as a whole, the five characteristics of promising or effective social care responses, which have been detailed across the previous chapters, provide a thematic foundation for developing future responses to extra-familial risks and harms. In this penultimate chapter, we note that while each can be drawn upon in isolation to inform service development, it is at their intersection that they most flourish, and they require certain system principles to be in operation. The response characteristics and system principles are then integrated to provide a framework that can support the design of new systems and services, or improve existing provision. The chapter closes with questions for policymakers, commissioners and service providers about the extent to which existing systems and practices align with the response characteristics surfaced through this review.