Thread by @BenGoodair

🚨New paper out in @socscimed today!🚨

We find for-profit children's homes deliver worse quality services than council-owned homes.

Privatisation across children's social care worsens Local Authority performance.

#OpenAccess available here: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Thread:

We detail how for-profit children's homes have come to dominate the provision of residential care.

Over 80% of children's homes are now run by for-profit companies...

We then compare the performance of children's homes to see if ownership status matters for quality of service.

Across all domains of Ofsted inspections - it does!

Local Authority run homes are the best:

We also check whether for-profit homes are more likely to violate the legal requirements that are placed upon them.

For-profit homes are more likely to violate at least one legal requirement and also violate more of them on average.

But what if this is just an error based on the different sectors providing different types of services?

We also test whether, on aggregate, levels of outsourcing are associated with performance for Local Authorities.

More outsourcing (%) is associated with worse ratings:

We conclude that:

"Our analysis shows that the outsourcing of these services has not delivered as promised in terms of securing high service quality for children in care."

There is so much more to explore in this area in terms of what this means for the experiences of children in care and why for-profits have come to dominate the service. But the results of this paper suggest that this trend might not benefit the children.

Our paper is entirely #ReproducibleResearch (!) the analyses can be recreated with our public dataset using the same code from here:

Really appreciate any feedback on this :)

github.com/BenGoodair/Out…

And a personal thanks from myself to lead author @AMBachMortensen and Prof Jane Barlow for involving me in the work in the most wonderful ways. I have learnt so much from them (more than about proportional odds assumptions) about how to create positive academic collaborations!❤️

cc: @NeenaModi1 @martinmckee @EmmaLewellBuck