Cordis Bright are delighted to be working with Foundations – the What Works Centre for Children & Families – and the Drive Partnership on a feasibility study of Restart. We are pleased to share that the protocol for the feasibility study has now been published.

What is Restart?

Restart aims to improve responses to domestic abuse in low-risk, low-harm families known to Children’s Social Care. It has been developed by the Drive Partnership (SafeLives, Respect, and Social Finance) and is delivered by Cranstoun and Respect. The programme adopts a whole-family, multi-agency approach, and operates at both the system level and the family level. Its primary goals are to hold perpetrators accountable for their actions, support behaviour change, and to ensure the safety and wellbeing of (ex-) partner and child victim-survivors.

Approach to the feasibility study

The feasibility study is taking an exploratory, "test and learn" approach, with a focus on building capacity for future impact evaluation. It will focus on understanding the programme’s theory and delivery in more detail, and determining the feasibility of future impact evaluations using experimental or quasi-experimental designs.

Why is this study important?

Domestic abuse affects approximately 1 in 5 children in the UK, harming their emotional, behavioural, social and physical outcomes, and domestic abuse remains the most common factor identified at the end of ‘Children in Need’ assessments.

Despite this, across the UK there is limited evidence in what works to prevent and tackle domestic abuse. There are few evaluations of interventions which aim to address domestic abuse, and less than a third of the domestic abuse programmes in the UK have been evaluated.

The feasibility study is an important step in assessing whether Restart can be scaled for a future impact evaluation. It will explore how well the programme is being implemented, the experiences of participants, and how future evaluations could be designed to measure long-term impacts on perpetrators and victim-survivors.

What does the protocol cover?

The published study protocol outlines the rationale for Restart and provides more detail about Restart. It also sets out the design of the feasibility study, including our approach, research questions and methods. This is available on the Foundations’ website here. We have also published the study on the Open Science Framework, available here. 

We would love to hear from you about this study. For more information, please contact Emma Andersen.