ESPO framework
April 2017
Cordis Bright is pleased to have been awarded a position on the ESPO framework (664_17 for Consultancy Services) for children’s and adult social care. For further information please visit here.
Archive of April, 2017
Partnership Against Child Trafficking Project
April 2017
Funded by the Home Office’s Child Trafficking Protection Fund, the ground-breaking Partnership Against Child Trafficking Project (PACT) will provide a specialist consultancy service to four UK local authorities in order to improve localised responses to child trafficking.
Cordis Bright will be working with the lead partner, ECPAT UK, and Missing People to help improve the response to children at risk of trafficking, children who have been trafficked and those who are at risk of going missing.
For further information visit the ECPAT UK site.
Evaluation of the Enhanced Case Management approach
April 2017
The Enhanced Case Management (ECM) approach is a new approach to working with young people in contact with the youth justice system. The approach is based on the Trauma Recovery Model, a seven-stage model that matches intervention/support to presenting behaviours and to underlying needs. ECM was developed collaboratively between the Youth Justice Board Cymru, the Welsh Government, the Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) and the All Wales Forensic Adolescent Consultation and Treatment Service.
Three YOTs volunteered to trial the approach, which was carried out with 21 young people with prolific offending histories and complex needs.
The final evaluation report can be downloaded below. For copies of all reports please visit the Welsh Government site.
Cordis Pulse: March 2017
April 2017
This month, across health and adult social care, we were interested to see the King's Fund report on the 44 sustainability and transformation plans (STPs) which show how local health and social care systems can respond to an environment of increasing demand and reducing finance. Cordis Bright has reviewed all these plans and finds two interesting points of note. First, despite much adverse publicity, very few plans include concrete proposals to close hospital beds, and secondly, around a third of the STPs do not yet contain any plans at all for social care savings. So whilst these plans are an important start they do not yet provide full clarity about how the health and social care challenge can be tackled.
It is often easy to forget that one of the factors which unites the majority of adult social care users, apart from their involvement in care and support services, is that they are often at, or sometimes below, the poverty line. This month, two pieces of research from Joseph Rowntree Foundation explore this theme in their reports on: a) the minimum income standard (which many vulnerable people and people with a disability do not meet), and b) on how poverty affects people’s decision making processes.
Concerning children's services, the report by the Child Welfare Inequality Project on how poverty affects the numbers of children in care or subject to a child protection plan reflects our own experiences of working across the country where we have identified substantial variation in numbers and in the quality of social work practice. One of the more worrying findings from the research, we think, is that children living in pockets of deprivation within affluent council areas were 50% more likely to be taken into care than children in equally deprived neighbourhoods in poorer local authority areas.
We agree with the report’s conclusion that the most likely explanation for this is poorer authorities – facing greater overall demand for child protection services and proportionately larger funding cuts – are more tightly rationing expensive safeguarding interventions. There is a real risk, therefore, that vulnerable children in some areas are not receiving the support they need. We have worked with a number of local authorities, experiencing significant resource challenges, to help them ensure that there is robust and defensible decision-making in place with the interests of the child at the forefront. Combined with support to ensure effective social work practice, we are helping to ensure that children are protected, whilst resources are used effectively and in an impactful way.