CORC collaborate with members and partners to evaluate interventions and support. Our research explores our own and others’ data to measure effectiveness, test hypotheses and generate evidence to improve care.
We aim to understand the extent to which children and young people’s care is helping them and how real-world evidence can support and improve child and youth mental health services. Once collected, we analyse data to assess the impact, the effectiveness and efficiency of services and to answer key research questions. Our work in this area includes:
Analysing members’ data and reporting to them on the findings. See more about Data analysis here.
Carrying out analysis using the CORC and other data sets to measure effectiveness, test hypotheses and discover new findings in order to generate evidence to underpin care.
Collaborating with members and partners to conduct research.
Evaluating mental health, wellbeing and other interventions.
Evaluation
We have a great track record of working on a range of small, as well as large-scale and complex evaluations, providing expertise to design, and deliver evaluations and evidence-led approaches to inform decision making.
Our current evaluations include the exploration of the Vanguard in the West Midlands, which follows our work on evaluations of the Vanguards in London and the Humber and North Yorkshire. Other examples of our work include independent evaluations of creative, mentoring and systems-wide support programmes. We evaluated Breathe Magic for Mental health, exploring how a creative intervention delivered in pupil referral units was associated with changes in child wellbeing. We also combined interviews with young people, staff and mentors with routinely collected outcomes information to explore a mentoring programme delivered in GP practices by West Ham United Foundation mentors. At a larger system scale, we evaluated the Beyond transformation programme hosted by Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust.
CORC led on analysis of the national Children and Young People’s Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (CYP IAPT) data collection and analysis and has advised NHSE on the development of the minimum dataset and outcome metric. We also provide schools with analysis of their pupils’ wellbeing on a large scale.
We hold data relating to mental health and wellbeing outcomes of more than 400,000 children and young people in the UK, a large data set for comparison. As part of Anna Freud, we work closely with leading experts in mental health, service providers and academic institutions, including Anna Freud, University College London and the University of Manchester.
Our evaluation work helps organisations to understand the reach and impact of their support. Our team are leading experts in research and evaluation, and would be delighted to work with you to understand your service or organisation's needs.
Our support includes:
Working with you to understand the questions you want answered
Developing logic models to unpick the processes driving your work
Advising and feeding back suitable evaluation approaches
Considering quotes for evaluations and discussing how these can be tailored to your resources and needs
Conducting evaluations drawing on over a decade’s experience
Please just get in touch to see how we could work with you: CORC@annafreud.org
Research
Our areas of research focus reflects our commitment to ensuring that mental health and wellbeing support for children and young people is informed by meaningful evidence.
Our research includes secondary analysis of large-scale outcomes datasets, studies on the implementation and use of outcome measures, work exploring how outcome measures can capture what matters to children, young people, families and practitioners. Examples include work on goal based outcomes and goals work, the exploration of different outcomes of care between ethnic groups, the exploration of measures’ psychometric properties, and research on how routine outcome monitoring can be embedded into everyday care.
If you're interested in conducting research, and would like our involvement during the early stages of research activities; would like to contribute to areas of research, including submitting qualitative or quantitative data; or would like us to review early sharing and discussion of findings, feeding into interpretation and understanding of them, please get in touch at CORC@annafreud.org
Translating research into action
Our aim is to explore the data and evidence that we and our members collect to further knowledge and understanding of what works for children and young people within the mental health and wellbeing sector.
Our work in this area includes:
Translating research findings into policy recommendations at national and local level
Engaging in national level dialogue with government, the National Health Service, academic institutions and like-minded organisations
Leading new thinking and theory in the field of children and young people’s mental health
Please just get in touch at CORC@annafreud.org
Do you have a question that could be looked into using the CORC data set?
We are keen to work with researchers and practitioners to explore the CORC data further, with a view to using the results to inform our members and the wider community of those supporting children and their families with mental health concerns. We encourage members and others to suggest research that uses the CORC data, to be carried out in collaboration with the CORC team. Where it makes sense to do so, we also consider research proposals for independent projects and can work with interns or students who are interested in conducting research using CORC data.
All research proposals need to be made in writing using this template. Proposals are assessed by the central team and put to the CORC Board for approval. Please note, proposals are reviewed on a monthly basis.
Please contact corc@annafreud.org for more information.
Useful Links
CORC membership
We have membership options to suit the needs of organisations and services operating across different sectors, providing varying levels of support and opportunities
Find out more
Turn your data into actionable insights, measure effectiveness and demonstrate impact.
Find out more
Take a look at some of evaluation, research and data analysis work with members and partners.
This evaluation highlighted the programme's impact, as well as cost avoidance, to inform future commissioning of the programme.
See case study report here
This evaluation drew on administrative outcomes data (including SWEMWBS wellbeing and SRS resilience measures) and interviews with young people, staff and mentors.
See case study report here