Conclusion

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Cliciwch yma am y Gymraeg

This report sets out our initial efforts at developing a process to map and track preventative spend across Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council. This included testing different definitions of prevention within a local authority context, as well as our attempts to describe how much is being spent on preventative activities and assessing the potential impact of spend in one area of focus: preventing parent-baby separation.

Our attempts to map and track preventative spend in this area revealed that Council ledgers currently do not allow for simple extraction of this data. While the Magu service in RCT has a primary purpose on parent-baby separation, other services contributing to this purpose work with children of all ages, meaning that apportioning of these budgets was required to track spend. Approximately £1.17 million is spent on preventing parent-baby separation in RCT, with around 55% of this on tertiary prevention: intervening to stop a problem getting worse or reoccurring.

Given the beneficial outcomes of efforts to prevent parent-baby separation, and that 73% of the current investment is short term grant funded, RCT CBC may want to consider the reallocation of core funding at the primary and secondary stages to mitigate the potential risk to upstream interventions should grant funding be reduced or cease.

In order to determine the potential impact of spend, focusing on Magu, we first sought to understand the problem further and what outcomes could be prevented. We found that there has been a gradual increase across Wales in the percentage of infants entering care over the past twenty years. We also found that entering care is associated with an increased risk of experiencing a range of negative outcomes in the short-, medium- and long-term, and that preventing parent-baby separation could prevent some of these negative outcomes. However, this depends on what is best for the individual child, as it is sometimes necessary to separate them from their parents due to the risk involved. Infants are also more likely to be placed in more permanent forms of care with typically fewer negative outcomes.

Services that aim to prevent parent-baby separation also aim to support families through the statutory care process and prevent recurrent proceedings. This may also have a preventative impact, as the experience of statutory proceedings is overwhelmingly negative.

After identifying what negative outcomes could be prevented, we set out to examine good practice from services where preventing parent-baby separation is a primary purpose. This enabled us to later compare Magu, which aims to work with families in RCT to prevent separation of infants under twelve months, to good practice elsewhere, to explore the potential impact of preventative spend in RCT without a formal evaluation.

We found that services offer a strengths-based model with holistic engagement that is designed to be different from statutory services. They employ a trauma-informed approach that focuses on building relationships. As well as offering practical and therapeutic support, services also deliver educative content to increase parenting confidence and skills. There were four main types of outcomes resulting from engagement with the services, relating to formal involvement with Children’s Services, interactions with professionals, parenting knowledge and skills, and parent health and wellbeing.

In RCT, we found that Magu aligns well with the good practice found elsewhere. It is reasonable to assume that Magu could have similar outcomes to good practice identified elsewhere. However, in the absence of a formal evaluation, and due to the short time the service has been operating for, it is not possible to make conclusive judgements about its full impact. However, lived experience testimonials highlight positive impacts on trust in professionals, parent health and wellbeing, and parenting confidence and skills.

Organisational data from Magu’s first year of operation also shows that, in May 2024, 41 out of 46 babies remained in parental care or returned following a period of separation, with this declining slightly to 38 of the 46 children as of September 2025. It is important to understand that this is a snapshot of impact at particular periods in time, and that this may change further over time, as the support needs for each family changes. This means that as of September 2025, the separation rate is approximately 17%, a significant reduction from the typical pre-Magu separation rate of 33%. If the current CLA status of this cohort were to remain stable over the longer term, with those not currently requiring CLA services remaining in this position until the age of 18, the total cost avoided (net of the cost of Magu) would be approximately £1.3 million. Analysis could be repeated for this cohort at different time periods to determine the longevity of the investment.

However, the existing data infrastructure means that it is difficult to evidence the ongoing impact of Magu. Data on the outcomes of cases are held by statutory services rather than Magu, and there is no mechanism within the datasets to identify the outcomes for children and families supported by Magu without relying on professional knowledge of individual cases, which is laborious. Other outcomes, which can be measured through lived experience testimonies, for example, will need to prioritised, as it is not feasible to routinely measure them all. The service should work with other departments within the Council (including Finance and ICT), stakeholders, and service users to determine what factors are most important in judging the effectiveness of Magu, how this could be measured and the data routinely gathered without placing additional burden on practitioners.

Recommendations

  1. Explore opportunities to develop the new management information system MOSAIC utilising the financial functionality of the system to allow for the incorporation of Magu data within the wider Children’s Services data infrastructure to facilitate routine reporting of outcomes that can be linked to the cost of provision.
  2. Secure expertise and capacity to effectively manage the collection and reporting of Magu data centrally to mitigate the need for the frontline delivery team to undertake laborious manual data collection.
  3. Collaborate with stakeholders, service users and other service areas to consider the outcome measures identified from other similar services and prioritise those that could be collected routinely by Magu.
  4. Use the populated the CIPFA spreadsheet to code preventative spend against relevant budget lines to monitor the level of investment over time, alongside known outcomes for families receiving Magu interventions.
  5. Track outcomes of Magu cases over a period of several years to determine the long-term financial impact of investment in preventing parent-baby separation.
  6. Consider the options to reallocate core funding at the primary and secondary prevention stages to mitigate the potential risk to upstream interventions should grant funding be reduced or cease.


Read the next section: References

Cliciwch yma am y Gymraeg

This report sets out our initial efforts at developing a process to map and track preventative spend across Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council. This included testing different definitions of prevention within a local authority context, as well as our attempts to describe how much is being spent on preventative activities and assessing the potential impact of spend in one area of focus: preventing parent-baby separation.

Our attempts to map and track preventative spend in this area revealed that Council ledgers currently do not allow for simple extraction of this data. While the Magu service in RCT has a primary purpose on parent-baby separation, other services contributing to this purpose work with children of all ages, meaning that apportioning of these budgets was required to track spend. Approximately £1.17 million is spent on preventing parent-baby separation in RCT, with around 55% of this on tertiary prevention: intervening to stop a problem getting worse or reoccurring.

Given the beneficial outcomes of efforts to prevent parent-baby separation, and that 73% of the current investment is short term grant funded, RCT CBC may want to consider the reallocation of core funding at the primary and secondary stages to mitigate the potential risk to upstream interventions should grant funding be reduced or cease.

In order to determine the potential impact of spend, focusing on Magu, we first sought to understand the problem further and what outcomes could be prevented. We found that there has been a gradual increase across Wales in the percentage of infants entering care over the past twenty years. We also found that entering care is associated with an increased risk of experiencing a range of negative outcomes in the short-, medium- and long-term, and that preventing parent-baby separation could prevent some of these negative outcomes. However, this depends on what is best for the individual child, as it is sometimes necessary to separate them from their parents due to the risk involved. Infants are also more likely to be placed in more permanent forms of care with typically fewer negative outcomes.

Services that aim to prevent parent-baby separation also aim to support families through the statutory care process and prevent recurrent proceedings. This may also have a preventative impact, as the experience of statutory proceedings is overwhelmingly negative.

After identifying what negative outcomes could be prevented, we set out to examine good practice from services where preventing parent-baby separation is a primary purpose. This enabled us to later compare Magu, which aims to work with families in RCT to prevent separation of infants under twelve months, to good practice elsewhere, to explore the potential impact of preventative spend in RCT without a formal evaluation.

We found that services offer a strengths-based model with holistic engagement that is designed to be different from statutory services. They employ a trauma-informed approach that focuses on building relationships. As well as offering practical and therapeutic support, services also deliver educative content to increase parenting confidence and skills. There were four main types of outcomes resulting from engagement with the services, relating to formal involvement with Children’s Services, interactions with professionals, parenting knowledge and skills, and parent health and wellbeing.

In RCT, we found that Magu aligns well with the good practice found elsewhere. It is reasonable to assume that Magu could have similar outcomes to good practice identified elsewhere. However, in the absence of a formal evaluation, and due to the short time the service has been operating for, it is not possible to make conclusive judgements about its full impact. However, lived experience testimonials highlight positive impacts on trust in professionals, parent health and wellbeing, and parenting confidence and skills.

Organisational data from Magu’s first year of operation also shows that, in May 2024, 41 out of 46 babies remained in parental care or returned following a period of separation, with this declining slightly to 38 of the 46 children as of September 2025. It is important to understand that this is a snapshot of impact at particular periods in time, and that this may change further over time, as the support needs for each family changes. This means that as of September 2025, the separation rate is approximately 17%, a significant reduction from the typical pre-Magu separation rate of 33%. If the current CLA status of this cohort were to remain stable over the longer term, with those not currently requiring CLA services remaining in this position until the age of 18, the total cost avoided (net of the cost of Magu) would be approximately £1.3 million. Analysis could be repeated for this cohort at different time periods to determine the longevity of the investment.

However, the existing data infrastructure means that it is difficult to evidence the ongoing impact of Magu. Data on the outcomes of cases are held by statutory services rather than Magu, and there is no mechanism within the datasets to identify the outcomes for children and families supported by Magu without relying on professional knowledge of individual cases, which is laborious. Other outcomes, which can be measured through lived experience testimonies, for example, will need to prioritised, as it is not feasible to routinely measure them all. The service should work with other departments within the Council (including Finance and ICT), stakeholders, and service users to determine what factors are most important in judging the effectiveness of Magu, how this could be measured and the data routinely gathered without placing additional burden on practitioners.

Recommendations

  1. Explore opportunities to develop the new management information system MOSAIC utilising the financial functionality of the system to allow for the incorporation of Magu data within the wider Children’s Services data infrastructure to facilitate routine reporting of outcomes that can be linked to the cost of provision.
  2. Secure expertise and capacity to effectively manage the collection and reporting of Magu data centrally to mitigate the need for the frontline delivery team to undertake laborious manual data collection.
  3. Collaborate with stakeholders, service users and other service areas to consider the outcome measures identified from other similar services and prioritise those that could be collected routinely by Magu.
  4. Use the populated the CIPFA spreadsheet to code preventative spend against relevant budget lines to monitor the level of investment over time, alongside known outcomes for families receiving Magu interventions.
  5. Track outcomes of Magu cases over a period of several years to determine the long-term financial impact of investment in preventing parent-baby separation.
  6. Consider the options to reallocate core funding at the primary and secondary prevention stages to mitigate the potential risk to upstream interventions should grant funding be reduced or cease.


Read the next section: References

Page last updated: 02 Mar 2026, 03:49 PM