26 Jul, 2022
Updated: November 2025
The For Baby’s Sake Trust worked with others to establish a core set of outcomes, indicators and measures to be used when creating, delivering and evaluating programmes to prevent and reduce domestic violence and abuse, whether working with those who use abuse, those experiencing abusive behaviour, children, babies and whole families.
The intention is to drive positive change, innovation, communication and genuine collaboration across professional boundaries and systems and the fragmented fields of early child development and infant mental health, early and earlier intervention, services for complex families and for those experiencing abuse or using abusive behaviours. This has the potential to simplify the landscape and enable better decision-making by those involved in the commissioning, delivery and evaluation of programmes, projects and services for all those impacted by domestic violence and abuse.
With funding from National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), the Policy Research Unit for Children and Families (CPRU) at University College London (UCL) has led the development of linked Core Outcome Sets for family and child-focused interventions for child maltreatment and domestic violence.
The Trust has been a leading member of the project development team since 2015 and, more recently, within the Steering Group overseeing the UCL-led project which brought together the views of all those involved and affected, including those with lived experience, to form a consensus and the final Core Outcome Sets in September 2021 (in time to influence the development of the new Supporting Families outcomes framework).
Following the publication of the Core Outcome Sets, the UCL team and Steering Group successfully applied for Home Office funding to explore how measurement tools in common use currently fit across the domestic abuse Core Outcome Set – this work was completed in March 2022. The Home Office included the need to demonstrate delivery against the Core Outcome Set for Children Affected by Domestic Abuse within proposals for the latest round of their Children Affected by Domestic Abuse (CADA) funding and in their evaluation.
The Domestic Abuse Core Outcome Set is embedded with Foundations’ REACH Plan – a five-year plan to find out what works to prevent domestic abuse and support child victims – including £2.6m during 2023-25 to conduct initial testing of three promising programmes, including For Baby’s Sake.
Most recently, Foundations has led the latest stage of Core Outcome Set development, commissioning the University of Sussex to identify and agree appropriate measurement tools for domestic abuse evaluations, due to finish in June 2025.
The For Baby’s Sake Trust was an advisory group member for research published by Foundations in July 2025, Selecting and Validating Outcome Measures for the Domestic Violence and Abuse Core Outcome Set (DVA-COS). Subsequently, we have been invited to join the Expert Advisory Group, led by the UK Trauma Council, to develop Trauma-Informed Guidance for the Core Outcome Set. This guidance will be published in Spring 2026.
