Hello. My name's Claire Mason, and I'm a research fellow at the Centre for Child and Family Justice Research at Lancaster University. And I'm really delighted to introduce today the resources that go with the pre-birth change project facilitated by Research and Practice in partnership with the Centre at Lancaster University.

It built on the Born into Care research and offered an opportunity for managers from local authorities and their health partners to come together to discuss pre-birth practice. The workshops had input from academics, from practice leaders, from other areas to share innovation and topic experts.

The change project offered an opportunity to share practice, to share challenges and solutions, and to build resources to help other local authorities to improve pre-birth practice for all the families with whom they will be working. The change project was underpinned by the Born into Care Research, a research series that has really focused on newborns in care proceedings because we knew so little about this cohort of infants prior to that research.

It was mixed methods. So this involve new novel data linkages, looking at the numbers and patterns of newborns in care proceedings across the country. It's also included a large scale qualitative piece of research where we've really highlighted stakeholder perspectives and have heard from practitioners themselves and most importantly, families experiences of services and it has led to new national guidelines to help support families where there is a separation at birth.

We really hope that the resources that we provide here will help other local authorities who weren't part of the change project but can use this to galvanise action in your own areas. It's really important to say that what we present here is not a one size fits all approach, but we really hope that you will use the information to prioritise and to drive your own area.

Action plans that meets the families in your areas needs and fits with your priority areas for change. Importantly, throughout both the Born into Care research and the change project we held in mind the voices of those with lived experience of the system. And you'll find throughout these resources some specific reference to those parent's voices.

Each key message begins with an introductory film explaining the rationale in the research underpinning that key message. There are also links to wider reading and to topic experts who will speak in more detail about that key message. We also have included some clips from practitioners where they talk about innovation in their own area.

Finally, we've included some reflective questions to help prompt discussion in your local area.
We've also included a simple self-assessment tool based on the born into Care guidelines that will allow those, if you wish to, to do a simple, quick assessment of where you're at using a red, amber, green traffic light system. And that should help inform your local area action plan and priorities.

As you will hear, there are a number of key messages. They're not designed to be used chronologically. They're of equal importance and many overlap and are interrelated. There's also a key theme running throughout around trauma informed and trauma responsive practice. Please scan through those key messages and start where you think is the most important starting point for you that reflects your local area priorities and action planning.

• Mason, C., Broadhurst, K., Ward, H., & Barnett, A. (2023). Born into Care: Best practice guidelines for when the state intervenes at birth. Nuffield Family Justice Observatory.