Unveiling Realities: Rethinking Personal Education Plans for Children in Care

This research proposal is designed to uncover the mechanisms of how PEPs work to influence the experiences and outcomes of children in care, the conditions which trigger or fail to trigger them, and to describe variation and commonalities in the PEP process, generating knowledge about how, why and if PEPs influence the educational, health and wellbeing outcomes of children in care through the following research questions: What are the outcomes of the PEP process: For children's education?

For children's wellbeing and mental health? For children's trajectories into adulthood?

What are the mechanisms within the PEP process which hinder or promote positive outcomes and experiences for children in care? How does the volition of the actors within the PEP process influence outcomes? What role do contextual factors play in the PEP process, and how do these affect children's outcomes and experiences?

This aim of this research is to bring to light children's experiences of PEPs, generating new knowledge about how they work, thus enabling policy makers and practitioners to make better decisions about the implementation of the PEP, which aspects are important and how to adapt them to different circumstances whilst meeting the needs of everyone involved.

A Project Advisory Group (PAG) will be drawn from the actors involved in the PEP process, who will advise on the final study design, recruitment and dissemination.

The PAG will help to construct rough Initial Programme Theories (IPTs), framing a realist synthesis of academic, policy and grey literature to develop preliminary theories regarding how, for whom, and under what circumstances PEPs help or do not help the adult and child actors involved in the process.

Theory elicitation interviews with actors will be used to refine these theories and, producing Initial Programme Theories (IPTs). Data will be analysed using NVivo software, with a node for each IPT.

Refined IPTs will then be tested through a realist evaluation which will describe national variation in implementation through a survey of the adult actors involved in the PEP, data from which will be uploaded to NVivo against the relevant IPT nodes.

Photovoice and Lego will then be used as part of theory-testing and theory-refining interviews with children in care, capturing the experiences of children whose voice is often marginalised.

Continuing to analyse data in NVivo, Context-Mechanism-Outcomes (CMOs) will be devised which provide new knowledge about how PEPs work, for whom, and under what circumstances.

The study will take place over three years, with the first year given to the realist synthesis and the second and third to the realist evaluation.

Findings will be disseminated through academic journals, conferences, webinars and through creative methods such as exhibitions, films and practice workshops.

It is anticipated that the impact of this research will be great; it will be the first study to uncover causal knowledge about how PEPs work. The potential of the research to inform practice and policy at a local and national level is therefore significant.