Assistant Director at Foundations / Champion for children's rights / Not for profit children's services leadership / Impact strategies for positive change
Get involved: building the case for greater use of Family Group Conferences The Kinship Strategy offers a boost for family group conferences at pre-proceedings stage. As part of this work Foundations is consulting senior children’s services leaders and elected members on what might make a compelling case for further development of FGC in local areas. Local authorities are expected in existing statutory guidance to offer opportunities for family group decision-making and the Kinship Strategy reinforces this. Foundations’ randomised controlled trial into family group conferences at pre-proceedings found significant positive impacts. The government are now committed to exploring using legislation to mandate the use of family group conferences at pre-proceedings in the future, alongside encouraging their use earlier in the system. In the meantime local authorities are continuing to deliver family group conferences and we are keen to learn more about what influences Lead Members for children’s services and Children’s Services Senior Management Teams when it comes to sustaining or increasing investment in FGC. We have previously spoken to local authority FGC co-ordinators, but now want to get a perspective from DCSs or ADs. Would you be willing to participate? We will use what we learn to produce a guide for senior leaders on supporting greater access to FGCs as a way of keeping children out of care and with their families.
A thread on the Department for Education's eagerly awaited National #KinshipCare Strategy ‘Championing Kinship Care’ 👇🗣 — We welcome the DfE's focus on building the evidence base on how best to support kinship families, and are pleased to be taking the lead on evaluating the launch of financial allowances, helping us to understand how best to implement them. With little research in this area, support provided by local areas is often not supported by evidence. But this does not mean it is not effective. We welcome The Strategy’s focus on developing the evidence needed to understand how to effectively support kinship families. Kinship families face higher levels of deprivation than parental families. Piloting & evaluating an expansion of financial allowances will allow us to see what impact this has, on kinship carers, and on the outcomes of the children they care for. At the same time, we can learn how best to implement this kind of support, so that it can be scaled up efficiently & effectively. We know from our own landmark evaluation that #FamilyGroupConferences can help keep families together & children out of care and are delighted to be working with DfE to support local areas to make high-quality FGCs available to families who need them. Exploring embedding the right to be offered an FGC at pre-proceedings in legislation is an exciting step towards empowering more families to stay together. In time, we also hope to see The Strategy's focus on piloting & evaluation translated into practice: all kinship families having access to effective support, wherever they live, and whatever their care arrangement. We look forward to working with DfE to understand the impact this Strategy has on kinship families and ensuring that all families have access to evidence-informed support. Read more on our blog: https://lnkd.in/ents2dhy
