Northamptonshire’s response to challenges in the care market and meeting the needs of our children in care

I recently presented at a shared learning event, facilitated by IMPOWER, with over 70 sector colleagues focused on how local authorities, providers and partners can respond to challenges around the commissioning of care for children and young people. It was a pleasure to share our journey at Northamptonshire Children’s Trust and to hear the perspectives of colleagues.

In 2023, Northamptonshire Children’s Trust started on a journey to address challenges we faced with meeting the needs of children in care in the right homes. As a children’s trust, we had a legacy of several years of inadequate performance where poor systems and processes were costing us money and not delivering the outcomes we aspire to for our children. This legacy, combined with sufficiency challenges, meant that many children were living in residential homes when we knew they could be supported by foster carers and the weekly costs for children’s homes did not always correlate with the level of the needs of the children they were caring for.

Our Circle to Success project, delivered in partnership with IMPOWER and Innovate Services, initially focused on a cohort of 265 children, including those living in our highest-cost homes. Analysis conducted using Valuing Care clearly highlighted the lack of correlation between children’s needs and the costs of their homes, so we knew we needed to do things differently. Our approach has cut across three strands:

Shifting to a needs-led home finding approach. By embedding Valuing Care in our home-finding referral and matching forms, we are shifting from focusing on behaviours to better a understanding and articulation of children’s needs in identifying suitable care and support. We are also personalising our home-finding approaches with providers incorporating children’s voices.

Understanding the market and building provider relationships. We are actively working to understand our local market and improve our engagement with providers, conducting market segmentation to better understand the positions of different Independent Fostering Agency providers and how to engage with them effectively. This involves recognising that providers are in different places and need tailored engagement from us, whilst we also need to prioritise our efforts to where we can have the most impact.

Rebalancing and monitoring provision based on needs. We use our focus on needs to have evidence-led and strengths-based conversations with providers about the cost and quality of care. We are using Valuing Care to consider the capacity of our own in-house foster carers so we can understand any gaps in knowledge and skills and build the confidence of foster carers in supporting children with higher levels of need. We are also now trialling an approach to codifying the capacity of our own residential homes and a small number of external homes to meet needs to improve matching, utilisation and outcomes.

The journey so far has led not only to financial savings (of £10.5m from the whole Circle to Success programme over a two-year period) but also improved outcomes for individual children that we can have increasing confidence are in homes better suited to their needs.

Our key learning and reflections

Our approach to commissioning needs to be more proactive and relational – with space and time created for stronger ‘on the ground’ collaboration between social workers, commissioners, partner agencies and providers, and a clear vision and set of aspirations we can all work towards.

Consistent and holistic understanding of children and young people’s needs is fundamental to finding the right care and support and achieving the opportunities that we want for children, and requires us to respond in a more ‘bespoke’ way.

Systematic use of intelligence around the needs of children is essential for empowering frontline workers and teams to do things differently for the children they support and delivering long-term culture change.