Changing Narratives: Our learnings from the Living Assessments project

by Ava Berry, Policy and Public Affairs Manager at NCB until 2025, and Robbie Duschinsky, Professor of Social Science and Health at the University of Cambridge

Over the last five years, the National Children’s Bureau (NCB) has run a major project called Living Assessments, in partnership with researchers from the University of Kent and the University of Cambridge. The project set out to explore how children’s social care assessments happen in England and what their impact is on the families and children who experience them. From the start, the project was shaped by the people directly affected by the issue.

This article reflects on that journey: what we learned, why it mattered, and what it tells us about how social care policy can (and should) be shaped in the future.

The Wellcome Trust funded the Living Assessments project from 2020 to 2025. NCB led the work on shaping policy and established three long-term experts by experience groups:

• Parents whose children had been assessed by children’s social care services
• Disabled children and young people
• Care-experienced young adults aged 18–25

This wasn’t tokenism or a box-ticking exercise. These groups were partners: advisors whose insight shaped the research, informed the briefings used with policymakers, and often spoke directly to the officials making decisions. Experts by experience were paid for their time and all expenses incurred.

Experts by experience didn’t just contribute personal stories; they changed how the policy team understood the issues and how the research findings were interpreted. They helped make the work:

• More grounded. Researchers and charity staff often talk about “systems,” “frameworks,” “interventions,” or “budgets.” But lived experience groups reminded the team that behind all of these are real families navigating complicated, often stressful situations. They gave the work urgency and clarity.
• More relevant. Policies can fail not because the intentions are wrong, but because some decision-makers don’t understand how their ideas actually land in real life. Lived experience groups helped NCB test whether recommendations were realistic or missed something crucial.
• More persuasive. Government officials, especially in children’s social care, hear from charities and think tanks all the time. But when someone with lived experience sits across the table and explains how a policy affected them, it changes the temperature in the room.

All of this work happened during a moment of unusual policy “permeability” - a time when change was genuinely possible. In 2021, the government launched the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, the biggest review of the system in decades. This created a rare opening because reviews often shape new legislation, new funding, and new policy directions.

The NCB policy team already had strong links with the Department for Education (DfE). With Living Assessments in place, we could use those relationships to bring research evidence and lived experience directly into the conversations that mattered.

Some key activities included:

• A rapid review of evidence on early help (later cited in government policy)
• Meetings with ministers and senior civil servants
• Consultation responses to major government proposals
• Running meetings of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children
• Bringing experts by experience into direct conversations with DfE and the Treasury
• Producing accessible briefings based on academic research

The rigorous academic foundation of our project, carried out by the University of Cambridge, also provided increased credibility to our asks and policy recommendations. Shaped and supported by co-investigators with lived experience of children’s social care, the quantitative research used administrative data to show patterns and back the individual experiences of our expert groups in relation to access to mental health services. (Find out more about this project strand.)

One of the clearest signs of impact came in 2022, when DfE commissioned new advisory boards made up entirely of children and young people with lived experience of the social care system. NCB successfully secured the contract to run these groups, and they directly advised on social care reforms.

The Living Assessments project showed that policy is better when it is shaped with, not just for, the people who live it. Lived experience makes research richer; it makes policy recommendations more grounded; it builds stronger, more credible influencing work; it creates opportunities for democratic participation; it challenges assumptions and reveals blind spots; it gives policymakers direct access to real perspectives; it strengthens relationships across government, charities, and research. Most importantly, it shifts power. When people with lived experience aren’t just consulted but genuinely involved, policymaking becomes fairer and more effective.

As the government continues to roll out major social care reforms, there is still a long way to go. But Living Assessments has shown a model that works: charities, academics, and lived experience partners collaborating over the long term.

This approach won’t fix every problem, and it doesn’t guarantee influence. But it does create the conditions where influence is possible.