What is the CORC Forum?
We are excited to be hosting our CORC Forum on Thursday 20 November, in just over a month. The Child Outcomes Research Consortium (CORC) host this event every year, which we'll tell you a bit more about, but first a bit of an introduction by Kate Dalzell, Head of CORC:
About me, Kate Dalzell
I began working at CORC way back in 2014, with a passion for helping services to use feedback and evidence to learn and develop. I had previously done this in local authorities in Manchester and London, but I was training to be a psychotherapist and wanted to bring my two worlds together.
Nowadays my job title is Head of Evidence-Led Improvement, and I lead the capable, committed and friendly CORC team. We are part of the Anna Freud Applied Research and Evaluation Division, and in addition to our original work with CORC (see below) we work on a number of other evaluation and research projects with colleagues across the Division and Anna Freud.
A bit of history of CORC and the CORC Forum
CORC was founded in 2002 by a group of mental health professionals determined to understand the impact of their work with children and young people. Members of CORC are signed up to a shared vision: for all wellbeing support for children and young people to be informed by real-world evidence, so that every child can thrive. Having worked closely with Anna Freud for many years, and in light of our aligned purpose, in 2021 CORC became a project of Anna Freud.
CORC has member organisations from a wide range of services (national and international) that support children and young people’s mental wellbeing support – spanning health, social care, education, justice, voluntary and community sectors. We provide knowledge on outcome measurement, and expertise in collecting quality data, feedback and evidence in pursuit of more effective child-centre support. We do this through our membership, consultation, services, resources and training. We also provide a comprehensive Wellbeing Measurement for Schools approach tailoring measurement to those in education settings.
The CORC Forum has been running for decades - initially an in person event, with visitors from overseas, since Covid it has remained online to maximise international attendance. It’s a yearly opportunity for our members, network and colleagues to come together to hear about work being undertaken to promote the meaningful use of evidence, to inspire others and to ask questions, and we always enjoy a high calibre of speakers doing great work.
In recent years these have included: Barnardo’s, #BeeWell, NHS England, Community Forensic CAMHS, Wellcome Trust along with CORC members, smaller VCSE’s, NHS Trusts, Anna Freud researchers and experts within the Anna Freud School Team. Each year we open the event with a keynote talk. Last year the talk by Dr Georgia Pavlopoulou on ‘Emotional triggers and associated burdens experienced by adolescent school pupils with diagnoses of ADHD, autism or both’ was particularly well received. As was David Trickey’s talk in 2023 on ‘Unravelling Traumatic Events: Minimising their impact through evidence-based understanding and intervention’, and Peter Fonagy’s talk in 2022: ‘The implications of our changing understanding of the nature of mental health to service design and the measurement of the effectiveness of services by Peter Fonagy’.
The Forum is part of CORC’s contribution to Anna Freud's Closing the Gap Strategy: through it, we help professionals to connect and share knowledge; we support the services that implement to get better at gathering evidence about what they do; and we share the latest research and evidence about what can help children and young people.
Attending the 2025 CORC Forum
This year we are delighted to welcome Eamon McCrory, Anna Freud’s CEO and Professor of Developmental Neuroscience and Psychopathology at UCL as our keynote speaker. His talk will explore ‘Trauma and the social world’, having undertaken extensive research exploring the complex relationship between the development of the brain, childhood trauma, the social world and mental health. This talk will include his recent work exploring the impacts of verbal abuse on children’s brains, perceptions and relationships.
As well as an update from me, sharing recent evidence and developments in understanding and improving child and youth mental health outcomes from across the CORC network and beyond, our agenda this year can be found here, with a summary below:
- Elizabeth Li, Project Manager (Umbrella Review), Anna Freud, and Lisa Coffman, Anna Freud and Barnett Parent-Carer Forum, Enfield and Haringey NHS Trust will deliver their talk: ‘Evidence on parenting support for parent carers of disabled children and young people and those with special educational needs’. Within this they will share brief findings from an umbrella review, meta-analysis, and qualitative meta-synthesis on parenting interventions for parent carers of disabled children and young people, and those with special educational needs, aged 0-25 years.
- Konrad Deckers Dowber, Managing Director of Advantage Mentoring and Mya Goschalk, Senior Impact and Insight Manager at Jami (part of Jewish Care) will each talk separately about ‘Outcome measures, data and evidence: the experience of CORC members’, which focusses on Advantage Mentoring’s flagship children and young person’s programme: Talking Tactics, highlighting the way in which they have harnessed the impact and evidence gained along the way to progress their mission. Plus, Jewish Care’s journey to embed outcome measures within the Dangoor Children and Young People Programme at Jami, how they made their data meaningful, and used data analysis to uncover insights, deepen their understanding of the service and shape their service delivery.
- Dr Simona Rasciute, Associate Professor in Economics Loughborough University will deliver her talk: ‘Health, Wellbeing and Place: Developing Data Infrastructure and Models to Identify Inequality Drivers’. Loughborough University, in collaboration with the Office for National Statistics (ONS), are undertaking research into the drivers of child mental ill health. The presentation will give an overview of the project, which was originally funded by the British Academy Innovation Fellowship scheme.
- Lee Atkins, CORC Regional Improvement Officer, will be closing the event with: ‘Launching new CORC guidance: developing effective outcome measurement as part of mental health support for neurodivergent children and young people’. This guidance explores identified challenges and provides recommendations for improving practice effectively with neurodivergent children and young people. In this session you will learn more about why and how the guidance has been developed, and how it can be used to enhance mental health support.
The event is online at 9.30am to 1.30pm, and all are invited to attend.
CORC members can attend for free as part of their membership, and will receive a discount code to enter when booking. The event is otherwise £50 for non-members. To access the event you will need to register your place here.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Kate Dalzell