This one-year feasibility study will explore and establish an Evidence Request Bank to produce and share appraised summaries of evidence for the voluntary and public sectors, in direct response to their practice needs. This fills a gap - opening up the evidence base for delivering public and voluntary services, particularly around early years, social care and other areas of potential preventative work. It creates a channel for partnership development and shared service development. The evidence bank will respond to requests for reviews of evidence from practitioners or policy-makers in the partner organisations. The process for evidence requests will be: 1) Partner service practitioners or managers develop a request for evidence: this is refined in discussion with the project manager to ensure that it is a clear researchable question 2) A research strategy for the request will be developed and discussed 3) Evidence will be appraised and selected 4) An evidence response report will be drafted 5) The report will be sent for peer review by both academic and research-user reviewers to ensure: a. The quality and appropriateness of the evidence report b. The coverage of relevant literature and ensuring there are no gaps c. That the report is in plain language and addresses the needs of a practitioner and manager audience 6) The report will be given to the research-user who requested it, and a plan for its use will be developed with the organisation 7) The report will be lodged in a public Evidence Bank allowing further access from interested practitioners. 8) The report will be discussed by the project management team to ensure wider learning and to plan further dissemination to relevant audiences The project builds on piloting work carried out as part of a Big Lottery funded knowledge exchange project which has developed the concept of the Evidence Request Bank with a consortium of voluntary agencies, conducted 6 reviews and evaluated the uses of the reviews with the practitioners involved. In the pilot, evidence requests have led to increased funding for services, informed service developments, informed policy-related work, contributed to the production of resources, and been used to share learning from research amongst staff. 100% of pilot participants reported that they would like to use such a service in the future. This application would enable the Evidence Request Bank to widen its scope to include users from both statutory and voluntary organisations. This is in response to requests from these partners to develop the model. Over the year of this funding phase a business model for the project would be developed to ensure sustainability beyond the ESRC funding.

High-quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) and afterschool-care (ASC) services are crucial for children's equal opportunities, particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. They are also crucial for supporting parents' ability to work and families' financial security. The closure of schools and childcare facilities and other social distancing measures in the wake of Covid-19, while important policies to reduce the spread of the virus and its burden on healthcare systems, created a national 'childcare crisis' with potentially severe effects on families' livelihoods and wellbeing, particularly for families in vulnerable circumstances. Since Covid-19 and its impacts are likely to be persistent, there is an urgent need for crisis-resilient solutions of high-quality childcare provision reaching all families beyond key workers. We know that community-based co-production can lead to more sustainable and effective local solutions than top-down policy-implementation, particularly for hard-to-reach groups. This project has two objectives: firstly, it will collate an evidence-base providing the most comprehensive picture on how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected families' childcare arrangements and wellbeing in the short and longer term. This will include collection of rich new data (in-depth interviews with parents and stakeholders) identifying the specific childcare needs and challenges of families in different circumstances (including socio-economic background, protected characteristics and geographical area), and its triangulation with secondary analysis of a wide range of data-sources on Covid-19 impact (including nationally representative surveys and convenience samples). Secondly, in partnership with local and national stakeholders and policymakers, the project will develop a co-produced policy-toolkit providing community-based implementation and practice pathways to support Local Councils' crisis responses and local communities in developing effective and sustainable childcare solutions during the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond. This childcare-toolkit will draw lessons from two local co-production labs (in a rural and an urban setting), from mapping exercises of diverse childcare contexts, and the collation of evidence on specific access problems and needs of different groups of families, particularly those in vulnerable circumstances. The innovative project-design combining a comprehensive array of data analysis with a collaborative co-production strategy for local service solutions will be pioneering in designing resilient childcare provision that protects family wellbeing during this pandemic and beyond. Our extensive analysis of a wide range of data will allow us to identify gaps in the existing data on experiences of families with young children during the Covid-19 pandemic and to make recommendations to policy-makers and data-collectors on what further data is required and what questions should be included in future data-collection. Our close collaboration with a wide range of project-partners in policy-making and civil society (e.g. Scottish Government, The Improvement Service and advocacy organisations such as Child Poverty Action Group, Close the Gap, One Parent Families Scotland, and Children in Scotland) helps ensure that our policy-toolkit is useful and applicable for a wide range of ongoing national and regional Covid-19 activities (e.g. 'CHANGE: Childcare and Nurture'; 'Access to Childcare Fund'-projects; 'Caring Community'- and 'Resilient Community'-projects; 'Critical childcare for vulnerable children'-programmes), and secondly, that it is widely disseminated by our partners across the country and different sectors

The main aim of PolESE is to develop a multi-disciplinary understanding of the political economies and consequences of school exclusion across the UK. There are great differences in the rates of permanent school exclusion in different parts of the UK with numbers rising rapidly in England but remaining relatively low or falling in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. For example, in the last available figures (2016/7) there were 7,720 permanent exclusions in England compared to just five in Scotland. However, these figures do not account for many informal and illegal forms of exclusion. In this research, home international comparisons of historical and current policy, practice and legal frameworks relating to school exclusion will be conducted for the first time. Previous research and official statistics show that school exclusions are far more likely to affect pupils with special needs, from low income families, and particular ethnic backgrounds. Exclusions have long and short term consequences in terms of academic achievement, well-being, mental health, and future economic and employment prospects. PolESE is designed to highlight ways in which fairer and more productive outcomes can be achieved for pupils, their families, and professionals by comparing the ways in which policy and practice around exclusions differ in the four jurisdictions. PolESE will be undertaken by the multi-disciplinary (criminology, disability studies, economics, education, human geography, law, psychiatry, sociology) and multi-site (Oxford, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast, Reading, LSE) Excluded Lives group established in 2014. In education, policy discourse has tended to find individual reasons for exclusion rather than develop an understanding of exclusion in the wider context of education, social policy and the law. Education policy has also largely ignored the work conducted by school and welfare professionals that attempts to address disruptive behaviour to prevent more serious incidents. In contrast, PolESE assumes that school exclusion cannot be treated as separate from the general welfare and education systems. Preliminary work has illustrated that pressures on schools to perform well in examination league tables can lead to the exclusion of pupils whose predicted attainment would weaken overall school performance, leaving these pupils on the social margins of schooling. Exclusion is a process, rather than a single incident, that can only be fully understood when examined from multiple professional and disciplinary perspectives. The research is organised into three work strands. Strand A, Landscapes of Exclusion, is designed examine the ways in which legal frameworks, policies, and practices of regulation shape systemic practice; and the patterns, characteristics and consequences of exclusion. Strand B, Experiences of Exclusion, will focus on families', pupils' and professionals' experiences of the risks and consequences of exclusion. Strand C, Costs and Integration, will examine the financial costs associated with exclusion; it will also integrate findings within and across jurisdictions to ensure that the learning is continuous as the research develops a coherent multi-disciplinary understanding of the political economies of exclusion. 1. The cost of exclusions at individual, institutional and system level (psychological, educational, sociological, economic, criminological, political lenses); 2. Rights and entitlements (legal, moral, social policy, political lenses); 3. Landscapes of exclusion (geographical, sociological, political lenses); 4. Protection and wellbeing (psychological, social work, legal and social policy lenses). Researchers will engage directly with the Third Sector, professionals at school, local authority and jurisdiction government levels, as well as with disadvantaged and excluded pupils and their families.