Stronger Families Norfolk

The rising number of children in care is a concerning trend, with over 83,000 children in care in 2023 in England. These children experience significantly worse life outcomes in areas like education, health, and employment compared to their peers. There is also a heightened risk of re-entry into care for those with previous placements. Family dysfunction is identified as a common reason for children entering care, highlighting systemic issues embedded in parent-child communication. At the service level, one of the problems lies in the individualised approach of services that focus on behavioural issues without addressing underlying relational and systemic aspects.

On a larger scale, local authorities face challenges (MacAlister Review, p. 25-27) due to the sheer number of young people in care, causing financial strain and sufficiency issues in sourcing care placements promptly. Keeping children in care is also expensive for local authorities, with some placements costing over £200,000 per year on average (ADCS Report, p. 99).

This situation leads to short-lived care placements, potential family breakdowns, and highlights the need for a shift in local authority spending towards more preventative measures as opposed to crisis interventions.

Stronger Families - Norfolk is a programme that supports children and teenagers on the edge of care (i.e. who are at risk of being taken into care) or already in care due to abuse or neglect. The intervention used is Family Functional Therapy – Child Welfare (FFT-CW). It seeks to improve communication and supportiveness between parents or guardians and young people, while decreasing hostility.

The local council was interested in funding the intervention in this new way as they were experiencing a pressing need to reduce the number of children in the council’s care to alleviate the strain on their local authority. The council were seeking a culture change around care support, to ensure their financial package could meet this need and to ensure that only the right children remained in care. They were keen to increase support and promote families to remain together where it was safe to do so, thus they started looking into this solution as part of their ‘alternatives to care approach’.

The ‘alternatives to care approach’ was primarily aimed at repurposing the council’s financing, instead of focussing on spending on care proceedings and placements, Norfolk County Council (NCC) instead wanted to prioritise finance for supporting families to stay together. At the time, NCC were seeing a general increase in the number of children coming into care who potentially could be looked after at home safely. Behind this immediate context for Norfolk, there was a wider backdrop of a national and local shortage of social workers.

Norfolk decided to procure the service using an outcomes contract to invite innovation through their procurement approach by specifying the cohort characteristics, intervention type and desired outcomes but without prescribing a specific model of intervention. Additionally, Norfolk also wanted to ensure that there was an embedded continuous ability to change and innovate in the delivery of the programme. Finally, there was a clear aim for the programme to operate on a collaborative basis with in-house operational teams and other partner agencies on the ground.

NCC wanted to bring collaboration and innovation to their support of families from Children’s Services

FFT-CW is a systemic evidence-based model of intervention delivered by skilled staff over 5-6 months of regular weekly sessions with the whole family. This model of intervention is sequentially phased. There is the engagement and motivation phase, followed by the behavioural change phase and the generalisation phase. Hence, progress is measured in every phase of the intervention.

The goal is to engage and motivate families, fostering sustainable behavioural change through the application of systemic family therapy skills and effective communication. The success of the clinical service is viewed as a joint effort, emphasising the importance of coordination and alignment with the system around the young person for optimal impact.

The intervention was not only aimed at achieving substantial cost avoided and cost savings to the local authorities but, more importantly, to improve outcomes for children. The intervention targeted children who could safely be looked after at home, emphasising the importance of empowering parents to make informed decisions about their children's welfare. To address the impact of family breakdowns, practitioners seek to establish strong relationships with families, although tensions between social workers and families can hinder these efforts.

Stronger Families is set up in a partnership with various organisations. This includes being commissioned by Norfolk County Council, the Department of Culture, Media, and Sport, and The National Lottery Community Fund. The delivery and intermediary partners include Family Psychology Mutual, Functional Family Therapy, and Bridges Outcomes Partnerships.