Our Services

Assistance with strategic planning and developing clear measures and indicators to ensure a continued focus on outcomes and impact for children and families.

Ensuring that all strategies, improvement plans, partnerships, and sub-groups, are fit for purpose, align, and will lead to improvements in practice across the partnership.

Monitoring and evaluation of action plans to ensure swift improvements are implemented, maintained, and can be shown to improve outcomes for children and families.

Facilitation of workshops with a diagonal slice of personnel to develop better and smarter ways of working.

Collating information and data from sources across children’s services and drawing up a succinct, clear, and coherent self-evaluation.

Comprehensive reviews of the functioning of individual teams or service areas, from management practices to social work practices, making recommendations for improvements.

This could also involve the oversight of any action plans developed to ensure that improvements were implemented and embedded.

In this case, undertake a ‘focused visit’ style inspection of an area of the inspection framework following the ILACS guidance.

​Gain an objective understanding of the wishes and feelings of families in terms of how they are engaged with. Developing an understanding of how well families understand the reason for social care intervention, how well families understand what they need to do, and by when, and whether families feel that outcomes are improving as a result of intervention

​Chairing any meetings that need an objective facilitator who can challenge in a supportive way to ensure that practice continues to improve at a sufficient pace.

Dip samples and audits can be undertaken in relation to themes or service areas to ensure that the quality of work is becoming consistently good, that improvements are becoming embedded into everyday practice, and that work is restorative, child-friendly and outcome focused.

Identification of areas for further improvement with clear recommendations of how to achieve swift and sustainable improvement.

This could also involve the moderation of audits and audit findings to ensure that both individual audits and collated findings lead to improved outcomes for children and families.

Help to improve the quality of planning. This could include workshops, training, and mentoring managers as well as working with staff to develop new planning formats.

Reviewing and reporting on individual cases where it is felt that there is learning for children’s social care and/or partner agencies following incidents, particular court judgements or any other event that warrants an official review.

Talking to social workers and managers about how an Ofsted inspector prepares for an inspection, how they develop key lines of enquiry, how they triangulate their evidence and why they ask the questions that they do. Discussing what inspectors look for when they talk to managers and workers as well as when they review a case, and how social workers and managers can maximise the time they have with an inspector to showcase their best work. Everyone would be able to ask questions and allay any fears they have about the process.

Reviewing all data, strategic plans and documents to develop key lines of enquiry

Training and mentoring in a variety of areas such as quality auditing; planning; understanding and dealing with data; recognising good work; hypothesising; reflecting; analysis and any other area of social work or social work management!

Training and/or mentoring of elected members, scrutiny committees, lead members, LSCB members, fostering and adoption panel members etc. on how to hold officers to account effectively, how to ensure that children are a priority across the council and its partners, and how to effect positive change in practice.