Enhancing outcomes for children with SEND through consolidated assessments, collaborative working, and a new service, resulting in faster statutory outcomes and significant financial benefits.
Building brilliant outcomes for children and young people in London
CASE STUDY
Building brilliant outcomes for children and young people in London
2. Moving to Adulthood: To achieve brilliant life outcomes for young people with SEND as they move to adulthood, three separate assessment processes were consolidated into a single coherent approach with families, complemented by new strengths-based, citizen-led collaborative ways of working with young people. A pilot team was created to work with young people and test these different ways of working. As a result, a business case was developed across two directorates, and the Health and Adults and Children’s Services directorates went on to work together to implement a new service. 3. Safe outcomes across Child in Need, Child Protection and Edge of Care: To achieve the outcomes defined in plans in the most timely way, to support children to thrive at home, and to achieve safe permanence for children in care as soon as possible, a new practice toolkit was designed to help practitioners. Regular group case discussions promote learning, quality assurance and collaboration, and a new dashboard supports every practitioner and manager in supporting children in a more efficient way. A workforce modelling tool matches capacity to demand and highlights opportunities to redeploy resources to enable a more resilient and stable service moving forward. 4. Prevention: Through working with schools, a new offer across children’s services to deliver brilliant outcomes for adolescents was explored. The pilot resulted in the Council implementing the Family Assessment and Safeguarding System model with named leaders linked to schools to continue to build relationships.
This London Borough children’s services were already in a position of strength, with a ‘Good’ Ofsted rating and delivering great outcomes for the children and young people of the borough. As a directorate, they wanted to build on this and further improve outcomes. Understanding the opportunities to improve We worked in partnership with the Borough covering the entirety of children’s safeguarding and part of its services support children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). Initially, 121 staff participated in workshops to review 199 cases; 30,000 lines of data were studied; 42 staff participated in live studies; and 86 participants responded to surveys to understand the environment for change. Designing and delivering lasting change Together, we developed these findings into four key focus areas. We focussed on creating sustainable change by engaging staff and families at every stage of the programme and developing lasting internal change capability. 1. Internal fostering: In order to increase the capacity of the award winning internal fostering service and maximise how it supports children in care, the foster carer recruitment process was transformed, from the website and marketing activity to creating a simplified application process. New technology, governance, and processes ensure every candidate is progressed and bespoke additional support is provided for those who need it.
Building capability and sustainability To sustain the improvements, from the start there was a clear focus through the programme on building digital, operational, and financial capability. Every single member of staff in the council’s children’s services department was given access to at least one type of training and professional development support. As a result, teams now feel more empowered to support children and families with the best possible data, tools and systems, measuring the success at every level. A comprehensive benefits tracking mechanism was also developed which enables the service to measure the financial impact.
Two years after the programme first started, the Borough has: tackled process delays and drift to deliver statutory CIN (two weeks) and CP (eight weeks) outcome plans faster. achieved permanence out of care 18 weeks faster by tackling drift and delay, where that is the plan for a child. implemented a new service that has enabled 181 individuals with SEND to seamlessly transition to adulthood by remaining closer to home, in turn reducing costs by an average of 41%. more than doubled the rate of recruitment of foster carers to the internal service. supported 32% more children to exit care through special guardianship orders or adoption, avoiding long-term permanence in care. As a result the programme has delivered £7.2m in financial benefit.
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CONTACT US
Steve Knight Partner
E: stephen.knight@newtonimpact.com
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