To create confidence through early impact during phase one – from June to October 2023 – the team focused on trialling the strengths-based Valuing Care approach, with a particular focus on children in high-cost placements.  

IMPOWER’s Valuing Care approach helps social workers, individually and as teams, produce a profile of needs of individual children and groups of children and to track this over time. On an individual level, the Valuing Care tool provides a holistic, nuanced picture of a child or young person’s needs which can then be viewed against their current level of provision.  

IMPOWER trained over 50 professionals to use the tool and 85 needs assessment profiles were completed. Following analysis, IMPOWER supported Cornwall to identify 45 children and young people as being potentially suitable for step-across (move from residential to family homes) or reunification. This was followed by a Better Homes panel, which reviewed 22 of these children and young people. 9 step-across and 7 reunification cases were signed off by the panel. 

Running an internal matching event and a provider event to try and match the 9 children and young people suitable for family homes, resulted in 1 potential match to a foster carer home. This highlighted the need to increase the recruitment and retention of the foster carer cohort, to meet the capacity required to provide the homes for the children and young people being identified through the new Valuing Care approach.  

Between January – April 2024, IMPOWER built on the success of phase 1, and turned attention to the fostering service, working with social workers and foster carers to co-produce a range of recruitment and retention initiatives to increase the size and capacity of the foster carer cohort. Using the Family Values approach, IMPOWER identified the motivations and behaviours of the type of people likely to consider fostering. This intelligence could then be used to ensure initiatives were designed to target these groups of people.  

Family Values is IMPOWER’s award-winning behavioural science-led approach to recruiting and retaining foster carers. IMPOWER has worked with over 20 LAs to improve foster carer recruitment, retention and utilisation. This work involves co-production with foster carers and in-house fostering teams to develop interventions and campaigns which apply behavioural science and values-based segmentation. 

IMPOWER also rolled out the use of Valuing Care’s Foster Carer’s profiles, a tool that enables social workers and carers to come to a shared view of a foster carer’s skills and experience, to assist with improved matching with children and young people and to enhance the council’s strategic view of their foster carer cohort. This in turn will help with identifying development needs and gaps in training offers for carers.  

Critical to the success in Cornwall, has been the willingness of colleagues across Children’s service to embrace change, leading from the front and taking ownership of the initiatives being introduced. As a result, Cornwall’s children’s services has further improved the resilience of the service and is delivering improved experiences and outcomes for children in care.  

The following examples show what this looks like in practice: 

1. The Valuing Care approach is now embedded in how Cornwall review the progress of all children in care, with approximately 25% of all Looked After Children having a completed VCARE profile so far. Cornwall is on track to complete profiles for 100% of Looked After Children by October 2024. 
2. The Better Homes Panel set up during phase 1, is now a monthly event, with dedicated resource and is chaired by the Service Director for Children’s Social Care. This is resulting in an increase in the number of children successfully moving from children’s homes to foster care; and an increase in the number of successful reunifications from care to parents’ and extended family members. 
3. Cornwall now have an improved recruitment and retention approach for growing their in-house foster carer cohort, with buy-in from the service, marketing colleagues and the foster carer association, with a detailed delivery plan for the next 12 months. 
4. The implementation of Valuing Care, and development of Cornwall’s Better Homes approach, has underpinned a wider cultural change in Cornwall’s approach to permanence planning and placement support which is positively impacting the experience of all children in care. 
5. For all this work, Children’s services now have a clear set of performance metrics and a monthly reporting schedule to keep on track and hold themselves to account on delivery. 

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