CHILDREN'S SERVICES

Under constant pressure to improve outcomes - leaders in children’s services are balancing
sustained funding cuts, a sea of different initiatives and mounting bureaucracy.
Meanwhile, social workers are operating in complex environments, making difficult decisions every day.
Dealing with ever-increasing caseloads, they are able to spend less time with children and families
- which is why they joined the service in the first place.

It is possible to improve outcomes for children and families, ease financial pressures, and support social workers to be social workers.
But this can only happen when you create a structure which enables professional decision making, links information from one service to another, removes the cultural barriers of working together, and ensures the right services are in place and commissioned properly. And the governance and leadership needs to supports this direction.

But how do you use evidence from the frontline to cut through the mountains of data, information and opinion in front of you? And then how do you empower teams to make change happen that will have the greatest impact?

Our case review workshops with practitioners across multiple authorities identify that 13-22% of care episodes could have been avoidable, had they been able to intervene earlier. We have seen spend vary between councils by up to 13% due to differences in practice and processes. Our work shows actual spend on other services, including early help and prevention, varies from 22% to 56%.

While there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution to fix these types of challenges,
by taking a similar approach our clients have:

• Reduced child in need and child protection caseload numbers by 29%
• Reduced adolescents in care by 23% through the implementation of an Adolescent Support Team
• Increased in house fostering capacity by 28%
• Increased closure without step up in Early Help by 5% through a refresh of the multi-disciplinary Early Help Offer

We help children’s services change and keep improving. No copy-and-paste thinking; no thick reports;

no half-measures. Instead, we commit fully with our clients

to finding the cause of the challenges they are facing - and then make service-wide change that fixes them forever.
But delivering large scale change across a complex organisation is difficult, and requires a specific approach.

We think every organisation can be better

Everything we do is built on the foundation of data. Of facts. Of insight.And that's what makes us able to deliver big impact, quickly.

We stay with you until the changes become the new normal. As we jointly design new ways of working we quantify the impact of the changes we make. Only when you think you can continue to achieve that without our support do we start to back away.

Does the organisational culture enable high performance? Is the service making the best decisions consistently? Are the services as effective as they can be to maximise long term independence? Does the service make the best possible use of limited resources? Our forensic, evidence-based methodology means that we leave no stone unturned. We develop an in-depth understanding of your people and ways of working and use this insight to bring clarity to your greatest complex challenges.

Our teams work alongside yours. You’ll find us sat with your social workers, designing the change with you. Together, we make change happen that makes tricky problems go away, forever. We aren’t precious about sharing our methodology. We find this knowledge transfer means your teams will have the skills to tackle problems in the future.

We put 100% of our fee at risk against delivering the benefits we identify – in terms of service user outcomes, ways of working and staff satisfaction, finance and performance. We have found that this approach generates a culture of one team, united by a single set of goals. We share the same view of what success looks like at every stage of the programme until the very end.