Tracey Sinnott has three grown-up sons, but was still unprepared for the challenges, four years ago, of caring for her first foster child – a girl with cerebral palsy, emotional delays and post-traumatic stress disorder. Fostering, she found, was nothing like parenting her own children. These days, however, Sinnott is doing what she describes as the best job she’s ever had: acting as a hub carer, helping other foster parents in Doncaster who, like her, may feel isolated and unsupported.
Sinnott is employed by Doncaster children’s services trust, an organisation formed in October 2014 to take over the running of children’s services from Doncaster council after the local authority had been criticised for its failure to protect children adequately. Birmingham, which has also seen high-profile failures that left children at risk of harm, is to follow suit. So how does the model work in practice – and what can Birmingham and other councils learn from Doncaster’s experience?
The creation of a new trust has offered the opportunity for a fresh start, says Mark Douglas, its chief operating officer. Most of the trust’s staff transferred from the council, and have undergone an extensive training programme. They welcome being part of a culture that is wholly focused on doing the best for children with a particular emphasis, adds Douglas, on “ensuring children are safe”.
The trust is directly accountable to the Department for Education (DfE), and its contract to provide children’s services to the council, says Douglas, includes “some very challenging targets”. But there have been clear benefits to operating as a trust, he says, including “commercial and operational freedom, which sometimes can be fettered within a council”. Free now to make important decisions more quickly, the trust is taking a forward-thinking approach to tackling problems, as evidenced by four key projects backed by £4.7m of finance from the DfE’s Innovation Fund.
“The benefit of being a trust is that we’re able to respond much more quickly, we’re able to make decisions more quickly, we’ve got a clear focus on the outcomes for children and making sure that everything we plan and deliver is intended to improve those outcomes,” explains Douglas. “The trust has allowed and encouraged innovation and … that’s supported the development of these projects.”
Finding and retaining good foster parents is a challenge for most children’s services, because children in the care system often have complex emotional and behavioural problems. The Mockingbird project has addressed that by creating two hub carer roles: experienced foster parents whose job is to help other foster parents.
Sinnott describes it as a “joined-up” approach: she and her colleague work with the mental health team and the looked-after children’s nurses team. Sinnott provides respite care when foster parents need a break, day trips for the families and monthly support groups where parents can chat informally: “It’s like going to town and having a cuppa with a few of your friends but in a safe environment.” The result has been fewer foster parents dropping out and more children staying with their carers – something Douglas expects to lead ultimately to better outcomes.
Some women – often with a complex mix of mental health problems, drug addiction and experience of domestic violence – fall into a repeated cycle of becoming pregnant and having their children taken into care. The Pause project is part of a national pilot programme to help women at risk of repeatedly having their children removed. “We work directly with the women to strengthen their self-esteem and wellbeing and to address the issues which led to their children being removed in the first place,” says Douglas. So far Pause has helped 21 women who, between them, have had 65 children taken into care. Since the project started a year ago, none of the women has had a further pregnancy.
Growing Futures takes a new approach to domestic abuse, which involves working with the whole family – abuser, victim and children. Senior domestic abuse navigator Louise Andrews [not her real name] is part of a multidisciplinary team of nine, and says the idea is to help stop the cycle of abuse – often, she says, children of domestic abusers go on to become either perpetrators or victims of domestic abuse themselves: “Unless we deal with the root cause of the problem we won’t change anything, and we have to do that by working effectively with perpetrators.”
Part of Andrews’s remit is to talk to children about how abuse is affecting them. If appropriate, she can then share what the child says with the perpetrators, which, she says, has a powerful impact: “When you’re hearing it from your child’s mouth,that hits home at a deeper level.” The project has already delivered tangible benefits, says Douglas, including a 7% reduction in referrals to children’s social care where domestic abuse is an issue, and an 11% drop in crime and “non-crimed” domestic abuse (incidents that don’t result in arrests or prosecution).
Finally, the Empower and Protect project, carried out in collaboration with other local councils, supports 13 to 17-year-olds at risk of, or recovering from, sexual exploitation. Specialist foster carers are trained to support the children, who are also offered help from psychologists and youth workers. It means, says Douglas, that the children can remain in a supportive family setting rather than be sent to expensive therapeutic residential settings.
Douglas believes the trust model has provided an opportunity to respond much more effectively to children’s needs. Sinnott agrees: “They’ve evaluated the previous practice, reflected on it, and transformed it into a workable plan, which is absolutely brilliant. I feel really proud to work as a foster carer for Doncaster children’s services trust.”
Content on this page is paid for and produced to a brief agreed by Doncaster children’s services trust
