Turning data into decisions: targeting early help for vulnerable families in Oxfordshire

Children and families often reach children's social care at the point of crisis. Support arrives late, under pressure, and at high cost – and families face statutory involvement that might have been avoided with earlier help. Yet local systems rarely get a clear, neighbourhood-level picture of where need is rising, which pathways children take through services, and which factors make escalation more likely.

Without that visibility, prevention stays a policy ambition rather than a practical plan.

Our approach and partners

ARC OxTV researchers at the University of Oxford worked with Oxfordshire County Council to turn existing local authority data into practical intelligence for planning early help. The team used four years of child-level information from the Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub and worked alongside council colleagues to shape questions, interpret patterns, and align outputs with local decision-making.

Instead of creating a new data collection burden, the collaboration repurposed administrative records already held by services. The aim was to show where referrals come from, how they move through the system, and where escalation is most likely – so the council can target support before problems become crises. Crucially, this was not a one-directional research exercise.

Working alongside council analysts and service leads built the local team's own capacity to interpret and apply these methods – embedding analytical capability rather than creating dependency on external expertise.

What we found – and why it matters

1. Need is not evenly distributed across Oxfordshire. The analysis revealed significant geographic variation in referral patterns and escalation pathways – place-based inequalities that stay hidden in county-level averages.
2. Escalation links to identifiable, practical risk factors. A small set of recurring drivers – including poverty, special educational needs, and parental mental health – showed up repeatedly in the data, offering services practical markers for targeting support before families reach crisis point.
3. The evidence directly shaped strategy. Oxfordshire County Council used the findings to inform its Family Hub Positioning Strategy, which the children's social care board presented to the national cabinet – translating local analysis into strategic infrastructure decisions about where to locate early help.
4. The council's own analytical capacity grew through the collaboration. Staff developed skills in interpreting geospatial and statistical evidence, creating a foundation for ongoing data-informed decision-making beyond the life of the project.

This was not a "data for data's sake" exercise. The analysis fed directly into how Oxfordshire thinks about where to place Family Hubs, how to align family support with local need, and how to focus early help on families most at risk of escalation.

What this means

For families, better targeting means a greater chance of getting the right help early – before worries become safeguarding crises, school breakdown, or entry into statutory care. For local services, it offers a practical route to shift resources toward prevention, reduce reliance on expensive reactive responses, and support more consistent decision-making across localities.

For the wider system, the work provides a model that other local authorities can adapt. Councils across England hold similar administrative data. The methods developed here – and the collaborative approach that made them usable – could be replicated to guide preventative investment in any area.

What needs to happen next

Scaling this approach requires sustained funding and investment in three areas: data infrastructure to link records securely across agencies; training and capacity building so local authority teams can conduct and interpret this kind of analysis themselves; and rigorous evaluation of whether Family Hubs, placed using this evidence, actually reduce escalation and improve outcomes.

The team has submitted a £1 million NIHR bid to scale the approach and evaluate Family Hub effectiveness nationally. But wider adoption will depend on broader commitment from government and local authorities. The main barrier remains financial – without dedicated resource, councils struggle to move from insight to implementation at the pace families need.

Lessons for future research

Building impact through administrative data depends as much on process as on analysis.

• Co-design avoids "interesting but unusable" outputs. Close work with Oxfordshire County Council kept the focus on decisions leaders actually need to make – such as where to place Family Hubs and which communities to prioritise.
• Harmonising data takes time – and it is worth it. The team had to align information across services and develop population-adjusted ways to score need before patterns became trustworthy enough to act on.
• Quantitative insight lands better with human context. Family narratives helped interpret what the patterns meant on the ground, and made the case for earlier support in ways that numbers alone could not.