Children's services

Our starting point is to help our clients improve outcomes for children, young people and their families and to narrow the gap. As part of this process we can help clients identify immediate and long-term efficiency savings, develop new and innovative approaches to service delivery, and support ‘invest-to-save' initiatives. We achieve this through our combination of:

• Direct and recent experience of working in leadership, management and practice roles within children's services
• A consultancy and research skill-set developed specifically within the children's services sector
• Offering independent and grounded advice and support based on ‘what works'
• Finding opportunities to draw on existing good practice and encouraging the sector to support itself

Our team includes people who had held roles such as inspectors, social workers, teachers, headteachers and local authority managers, as well as national roles with central government and the National Strategies

We are able to offer expertise in:

• Tackling child poverty: much of the work we undertake for clients is underpinned by objective of reducing child poverty. We offer advice on support on all aspects of the Child Poverty Act 2010, including effective partnership working, needs assessments and strategy
• Early years and childcare: we work with local authority early years teams, children's centres, and private, voluntary, independent and maintained settings to help them deliver the Early Years Foundation Stage and fulfil the Early Years Outcomes Duty and the statutory duties under the Childcare Act 2006. We also have expertise in childcare sufficiency assessments, action planning and managing the market; and in family support services
• Safeguarding and child protection: recent work has focused on performance improvement and performance turnaround to help local authorities respond to Laming 2. We advise and support Chief Executives, Directors of Children's Services, management teams, practitioners and Local Safeguarding Children Boards.
• School improvement: we work with school improvement teams and individual schools to improve outcomes for pupils. Our support includes pre- and post-Ofsted support, advice on self-evaluation, data analysis and performance management, and coaching and mentoring for school leaders.
• Youth inclusion: drawing on our extensive experience in the youth justice field, we are increasingly working with Children's Trusts on youth inclusion, preventing disengagement and support to young people not in education, employment or training.
• Partnership working: we understand the complexity of partnership working between statutory agencies. We can also help in relation to working with the independent sector and the local community. We offer support and guidance in relation to multi-agency working, establishing partnerships, and reviewing governance arrangements and commissioning, all with the aim of achieving better co-ordination of front-line services and greater efficiency in the use of resources and staff.
• Evaluations, service reviews and needs assessments:; recent examples include evaluations of family support services and of cross-authority anti-poverty initiatives; reviews of governance arrangements, speech and language therapy services, a City Learning Centre; and needs assessments for Children's and Young People's Plans and for the roll out of children's centres. We have a particular expertise in demonstrating the impact of outcomes and identifying cashable savings from prevention and early intervention.

Case studies