Research in Children’s Social Care in the United Kingdom operates in a framework that was initially designed to support medical research within healthcare settings. Although adaptations to this framework have been made for social care settings, our experience suggested that significant systemic and organisational challenges to conducting large-scale randomised controlled trials in fostering services in the United Kingdom still remain, which work against the likelihood of such studies being completed successfully. A further challenge we faced was that that many fostering services were relatively inexperienced with research and lacked the infrastructure to support it.
