BCFT Business Plan 2023-2027

Bradford Children and Families Trust interim business plan was agreed between the Trust and Bradford Council in April 2023. This is a summary of the Trust’s annual update of the full business plan submitted in September 2023. The plan has been developed in close collaboration with the people who will make this Trust a success. So, this plan not only reflects the ambitions of leaders in the Trust, but it also captures the views of frontline staff and managers, key stakeholders from across the system and the partners whose support remains crucial for our continued progress.

The business plan has many purposes. It is the basis of the contract between the Council and the Trust to deliver services on their behalf, but also sets out the Trust’s ambitions and how these connect with strategic plans for the Bradford District. And it is the base for all our planning in the Trust.

This plan also drives the improvements needed to address the shortcomings in services identified by Ofsted which led to: the Secretary of State for Education issuing an Improvement Notice in December 2018; a direction from the Secretary of State, who also appointed a Commissioner in 2021; and, following an inspection in 2022, which found that services had deteriorated further, the creation of the Bradford Children and Families Trust in April 2023. The Trust is accountable to Government through the Department for Education whilst under this direction.

The national context for children’s services is challenging. The Independent Review of Children’s Social Care in England 2022, highlights that resources have been drawn towards expensive ‘late help,’ taking away from helping families earlier and often more impactfully. This picture is mirrored in Bradford, but we are working hard to change that.

There are wonderful opportunities in Bradford, but great challenges too, with high rates of poverty, and poor health for many, and profound inequalities.

The Trust’s inheritance has been and remains challenging, starting with high numbers of children in care and subject to child protection plans, coupled with real delivery challenges because of an insufficient and too often transitory workforce. Much has changed and the progress to date is summarised in the updated plan. Children’s Social Care services were significantly overspent against allocated budgets for several years, but the budget is now under greater control and savings are being delivered linked to better outcomes for children and for staff. Turbulence in leadership and the workforce since 2018 has been replaced with a stable leadership team of permanent staff and a significant increase in permanent staff at all levels.

Staff and partners are all committed to the changes needed and have supported and co-produced our progress so far. It’s clear from early work with staff and managers in the Trust, and with our partners, that there is huge commitment and energy to deliver the Trust’s ambitions.

The creation of an independent Trust has been a new beginning which creates new opportunities. We are determined to bring about continued improvements to these services, which impact on the most disadvantaged children in the Bradford district.  Our ambition is for services to be operating at Ofsted ‘good’ level. The Trust has Seven Priorities, and this plan highlights the ten most pressing actions which are making the biggest impact on those priorities and securing a platform for other improvements to be made: our Top Ten Delivery Imperatives.

We are delivering our priorities through our four core plans:

A Clear Financial Strategy

Underpinning all of the Trust’s work is a Medium-Term Financial Plan framing a robust and creative approach to managing available resources. We are committed to living within our agreed resources and will use the flexibility of the Trust as an independent company to seek additional funding wherever possible.

Priority One – strengthened services to provide earlier help for children and families:

We are strengthening our early help arrangements and putting local family hubs at the heart of local communities, based on a good understanding of the diverse needs of local people. We have extended and continue to develop our family help offer, with enhanced intensive help for those families under greatest pressure and through re-focused youth support, to build a wide offer of family help which reduces the need for social work involvement and ultimately reduces the number needing to come into our care. Together with partners we will reduce the need for later support and already have evidence of a reduction in children needing to come into care.

Imperative: Develop a wider range of Early Help and Family Help interventions with partners

Priority Two – improved quality of relationship-basedpractice and decision making with a clear focus on outcomes:

We are still focused on ensuring that we get the basics right and doing the simple things well. We are getting alongside children and families with a ‘Family First’ commitment which will empower them to cope better. They are already more involved in decisions about their
own lives through family group decision making and family help, with networks of support being enabled. We have been building better relationships with families using a relationship based restorative practice model. We are using professional case audit to improve the quality of practice. The quality and consistency of decision-making is improving. And we are making the social work job doable through manageable caseloads, good management oversight and a supportive working environment.

Imperative: Improve social work practice and do the simple things well
Imperative: Create an environment where social work can flourish

Priority Three – better choices for local care:

The children in our care need the right placements and right support to be their best selves. We are working to improve choices of care for our local children by building fostering and residential capacity, as envisaged by the Placement and Sufficiency Strategy 2022. We are reviewing existing placements to ensure young people are living in the right place with their long-term plan in mind and to reduce the high costs of any unnecessary out of area provision. We are offering appropriate homes for care leavers and high-quality support into adult services where these are needed.

Imperative: Establish the Sufficiency Board to deliver more local care

Priority Four – The Trust being alongside children and families to empower them to cope better:

We are listening better to children and young people and to families to make sure we enable them to seek their own solutions and that we provide what they need. We have much more to do in this area. We are listening to partners and people in local communities to learn how best we can help, including learning from complaints. We are focused on “do with, not to” and ensure our families feel valued in the way we work.

Imperative: Embed a child and family engagement framework

Priority Five – stronger partnerships:

We are building stronger partnerships which ensure good multi-agency work at all levels based upon shared priorities. Good local collaboration on the ground, in multi professional teams, is becoming the basis of cross agency collaboration. Our strategic partnerships will be based
upon good analysis of need and agreed priorities delivered through joint strategies and plans for the future. We have been rebuilding the trust of partners, but this is a long-term area of work.

Imperative: Develop and maintain close cross-system partnerships

A Better Place to Work

Priority Six – a culture that delivers a stable and high performing team

We continue to take forward, through the People and Culture Plan, work which ensures that we can meet current and future workforce capability and capacity requirements, and a place where people want to stay and will have opportunities for development and progression. We need to attract and retain a permanent workforce of experienced staff which improves stability and better reflects Bradford and its diversity and have made significant progress already. We are building on the Bradford Teaching Partnership and partnerships with local social work and other courses beneficial to our service needs. There is an opportunity for local public sector organisations to collaborate to build a better skilled local workforce.

Imperative: recruit and retain more staff

Our ambition is driven by the desire to deliver for the communities we work with and informs how we work together, how we continuously improve to achieve high performance, whilst demonstrating value for money and using our INSPIRE Values as the guiding principles that define our identify, ways of working and choices.

Our employees are critical to our success and the talent we want to nurture and support. We have the independence to do things differently and we are committed to engaging and involving in meaningful ways, listening to their views, providing them with effective leadership and management, and development opportunities that increase motivation, maximise potential and achieve the right outcomes.

The Trust started in April 2023 and since then we have focused on transition, setting ourselves up for success and developing the plans for future service improvement. Our plans have been embedded within our work building a new relationship with staff and managers throughout the organisation, driven and monitored through the delivery of our People and Culture Plan

Organisational Effectiveness Plan – An Efficient and Effective Organisation Work

Priority Seven – the new Trust arrangements stabilised:

We have delivered significant progress towards stabilising the new Trust arrangements to ensure confident dynamic leadership and the capacity to lead change. We have strengthened leadership at all levels and are devolving decision making as close to frontline services as possible over time, with clear pathways and protocols in place. We have made progress in tracking impact through the intelligent use of data. We are developing high quality bespoke support services which wrap around professional practice. We will operate the council contract well and are improving communication.

Imperative: develop a performance framework to ensure delivery.

We are committed to operating effectively and efficiently. The Trust has built a performance framework across all areas and a clear reporting system. Significant work is continuing on the quality and accuracy of data to reduce the need for frequent rechecks and progress is being made.

We have developed our strategic planning approach: delivering our business plan through our four strategic plans, service plans and operations/team plans which cascade priorities and activities into staff appraisals. In doing this, the Organisational Effectiveness Plan is an enabler for each of the other strategic plans: providing the infrastructure and processes that support and monitor delivery, feeding reporting requirements to provide reassurance to the Board, Committees, Council and auditors.

Support services are vital to ensuring the effectiveness and efficiency of our front- line services. The Trust has dedicated HR, finance and ICT, procurement, performance and complaints, marketing and communications, executive support data and governance services to deliver corporate support. The Plan embeds the enabling role that corporate teams play across the Trust in proactively and efficiently providing infrastructure and support to frontline services. It is driving the development of our EDI Strategy, which spans the breadth of our services, our relationships with the communities we work with, our effectiveness as an organisation and how we ensure we have a workforce which is both representative and valued for its diversity.

These services provide a key linkage to the Council through effective management, refresh and oversight of the Service Level Agreements which are fundamental in providing many of the systems and support services that we rely upon on a day-to-day basis.

The role of the Board is to set strategic aims for the Trust, oversee the
management of the business and hold the Executive Leadership Team to account. It is the responsible body for the performance of the Trust for its legal and contractual obligations and achieving outcomes for children in the Bradford District.

The governance arrangements for the Trust are in its Articles of Association. The Service Delivery Contract with the Council shows how the trust will work with the Council to ensure priorities and objectives specified within the contract are delivered, how decisions are made and how the Trust is held to account.

Working with the Council is through the Operational and Strategic Joint Working Groups: regular meetings between the Trust Chief Executive and the Council Chief Executive; Executive Director of Children’s Social Care and Practice in the Trust and Council Lead Member; and close working with the statutory Director of Children’s Services and Council Director of Finance.

Bradford Council exercises the statutory responsibility for delivery of children’s
services through the Director of Children’s Services who is a member of the Council’s leadership team. They remain closely involved with providing support and challenge to ensure best results for children, alongside carrying responsibility for Education in the Council.

The Council’s Overview and Scrutiny Committee is responsible for overseeing outcomes for children for the Bradford District. It monitors support for vulnerable children through the Children’s Social Care Improvement Plan.

The Council’s Corporate Parenting Panel ensures that the Council fulfils its duties as a corporate parent to children in Care and Care Leavers.

How we will work with partners

Partnership working is essential to hold together the efforts of all public sector, community and voluntary organisations to benefit the lives of local people. In practice this means a shared vision, a joint mission, approach, with joint commissioning to underpin delivery.

We believe that keeping vulnerable children and young people safe from harm is everyone’s responsibility and that collectively we will only be successful if all partners work together across the District. Everyone who works with children, families and young people in Bradford shares responsibility for improving outcomes for the most vulnerable children, young people and families.

The Trust will play an active role working alongside our strategic partners in the Bradford District Safeguarding Children Partnership, the Health and Wellbeing Board and the Bradford and Craven District Partnership. We will continue to strengthen working at strategic and operational level with our key delivery partners in the police, health and education sectors. We will continue to build strong links with local voluntary and community partners