Our vision is for all children and young people in the Bradford District to be safe and able to realise their full potential. Our purpose is to provide high quality services with partners that help safeguard, support and promote the welfare of children, young people and families. We want our children to be safe from harm, ready to learn and do well at school; prepared for adult life, able to make healthy lifestyle choices, to enjoy their childhood and have fun growing up, and have a voice that has influence.
Our Promise as Corporate Parents to our children and young people in our care and care leavers, is to make sure that in everything that we do we will make sure they feel valued, loved and respected, find the right home for them, and to help them feel safe and settled, and support them to stay safe. We will work with them to plan their future, to make sure they have the right support in place when they leave care, and to listen and act on what they tell us about their experiences in care and leaving care, and what we can do to make it better.
This Promise has been co-produced with children and young people to make sure that it is meaningful to our children in care and care leavers. Each local authority has a legal duty to ensure they have enough suitable accommodation and services to meet the needs of all children in their care, and those at risk of needing care.
Our Principles
Restorative Practice
Relational and restorative practice is at the heart of how we create an environment where children, families, teams and the wider community, feel safe, valued, included and heard. During times of change and challenge, this approach enables us to create consistent and sustainable positive outcomes in all our work. We use the Restorative Practice approach to build relationships with children and families and encourage them to engage with our support. We use the approach in all our staff training and in all areas of social care
Whole System Approach
We recognise that collaborative, extended and community support is key. By all agencies working together we aim to ensure that help is there when children and families need it, and where they need it. We want our children and families to benefit from us working in partnership so we can join up our services, share pathways and budgets, and plan together. This will mean we are making the best use of our combined resources to meet the needs of our young people and achieve the best outcomes with them. Our Partnership Sufficiency Board monitors the number and progress of children in our care, care leavers and young people to determine the homes they need. The Board provides us with a strong approach to sufficiency governance and helps us develop plans to provide homes and services including internal fostering, residential care, and leaving care.
Commissioning
We take a holistic, system-wide, joined up approach to commissioning based on careful needs assessments. We are a significant purchaser of services. We use this to influence provider markets both regionally and locally, through driving innovation, ensuring that contracts respond to our needs, and that they deliver high quality services at a fair price. We recognise that our providers are key to us being able to deliver our sufficiency ambitions. They are an important part of the team around the child and helping to improve outcomes for our children. We have a commitment to applying a transparent and responsive approach to provider engagement and to working together to respond to the needs of children in Bradford.
The Voice of our Children
Better outcomes for children are at the heart of everything we do and the involvement of children and young people in decision making about their lives, truly understanding their lived experience and our impact to improve that is a top priority for us. We are committed to using their feedback to shape our practices and services and work together to deliver and achieve change. Our Participation Service continues to develop the Children in Care Council, a community of care experienced young people who champion change to improve the lives and outcomes of children in care. We have work to do to hear more voices, collate the feedback from our children and families better and extend their involvement in shaping future plans and services, but are seeing individual records of children’s lived experiences and views in case records, with increasing numbers of social workers and Independent Reviewing Officers writing records to their children.
Whole Family Decision Making
Children have better outcomes when they are in the care of their families, or wider family and friend networks. We are committed to embedding a focus on the family in our practice. Families report that they feel that they are able to make decisions about their own lives through family group decision making, co-production of plans, and family help and we will expand, and continually improve, these services. We will strive to ensure that kinship care is explored in the first instance. We will work with families to support them to be the best possible caregivers
Our Priorities
1.1 Prevention and Early Help
We will do everything we can to help children and young people to remain at home with their families provided it is safe to do so
We will increase access to our Early Help, Family Help and Breaking Cycle Services.
We will increase and improve access to residential and community Short Breaks across Bradford through multi-agency support and provision, and through the development of high-quality in-house provision.
1.2 Families First
If children cannot remain safe at home with their parents, we exhaust all avenues to enable them to be cared for within their extended family by the people who love them best
We will strengthen relationships between the kinship service and Family Group Conferences and develop the support available to Kinship Carers.
We will develop support available to SGO carers and increase staffing capacity across the SGO service to promote better partnership working.
1.3 The Right Place
When it is not possible for children to remain with family or friends, and they come into our care, we do our best to make sure where they live and are cared for is the right place to meet their needs.
We will work with local IFAs and internal fostering services to identify foster carers for children under 12 in residential homes.
We will identify children under 12 in residential homes who could potentially return to family and coordinate multiagency support plans to progress this in a timely way.
We will develop an enhanced support offer for foster carers and residential homes including increased emotional and mental health support.
1.4 Permanence and Reunification
When children come into our care, we maintain a constant focus on family and loving relationships and work proactively to reunite children with their families as soon as possible, provided it is safe to do so
We will ensure all children are supported to achieve their permanence plan in a timely way.
We will increase the number of children reunified with their families and decrease the number of placement breakdowns through enhanced support.
1.5 Support into Adulthood
Our role as Corporate Parents doesn’t end when our children turn 18. We are committed to helping our young people find the right home and supporting them to become independent as they become young adults
We will ensure all children aged 16+ have a move on plan and all Care Experienced young people have a safe and suitable place to live beyond the age of 18.
We will provide high-quality homes and a smooth and supportive (including mental health support) transition to adulthood.
We will ensure that all children leaving custody have a safe, suitable place to live, have the skills to live independently, and reduce the number of children who re-enter custody. We will ensure that all Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Children live in accommodation which meets their cultural needs