Bournemouth, Christchurch & Poole Council

What attracted you to BCP Council?

"I've always been a bit of a problem solver, and I like to make things better. I'm probably more comfortable somewhere where there is a real need to make a significant difference.

I have helped other authorities get to outstanding, however I have a real passion to make a difference. I am quite challenged by the fact that we have a national system whereby, for some children, it's a postcode lottery and so I feel my value base is that I need to do something better for those children.

So struggling environments are where I see my space, really. I've always known from my experience in my previous roles and also here, that there is an incredibly great, passionate team of people really trying to do their best. And with the right environment, the right leadership, support and culture they will absolutely thrive and deliver phenomenal things for children and young people and so that that's why BCP Council was so attractive."

What was it like when you arrived?

"I stepped into a challenging environment. We'd had the local government reorganisation, bringing together three separate councils to one, quite a few interim leaders, and of course an Ofsted inspection which rated the Children's Directorate as inadequate. I changed the narrative about Ofsted and made sure that our language was all about moving forward from the inadequate judgement.

There was a blame culture and people did not feel supported, the senior team have worked hard to address this and helped develop more of a supportive, learning culture. We can really see the difference this is making in our teams and how we are building better relationships with our partners and communities to help us on our journey."

What has changed since you joined?

"So how do you know when you're doing a good job? Well, you start by ensuring the work we do is child-centred and manage this through good quality assurance structures and processes.

We have a very clear quality assurance framework, which BCP Council didn't have before and that keeps everybody safe. It keeps everybody focused on what it is that we need to do and points towards how we do the work around here. Evidencing that we are child-focused.

Our quality assurance structure has been favourably looked upon by Ofsted. They recognise that our quality assurance process works alongside workers so it's a collaborative learning process. We all work together, understanding what good looks like and supporting people to be the best they can through the work that they do. We make sure there is recognition of good work. When I see a good piece of work, I'll send out an email to the member of staff recognising their work with a family and or child.

We also have a good council-wide recognition scheme."

What about practice?

"We also needed to make sure that we understood the lived experience of children and young people, what life feels like for them and how our work can make a positive impact on their lives. And be very clear about what our work, our data, our files and our recording say about their lived experience and our role in supporting them. We wanted to make sure the voice of the child and young person is front and centre to everything we do.

When I started, there was a lot of language in files that might have been perceived as child blaming. Now all our records are written to the child and so people now have really got that sense of the child's lived experience and how this has informed us about the work we need to do to support that child."

"What do you want to say to anyone interested in working for BCP Council?

"There's always an outside perception that because we're moving from inadequate that not a lot of great stuff happens here. In actual fact, it's a really good landscape to deliver some really innovative and creative things.

But good and outstanding things do happen here. I hope that people who work here and who are thinking of working here feel that they have the environment in which to flourish and be the best they can to make a difference to children and young people and their family's lives.

Overall, I want to be visible, present and approachable. It is what I want all my managers to feel, and to practice. We have a great landscape to deliver good outcomes for children and their families, and I want to make sure that everyone has a voice to help us deliver better outcomes for our children and young people."

Our Wellbeing Charter explains our commitment to supporting wellbeing, it includes the steps colleagues can take to enjoy a happy, healthy and productive time, both in and outside of work. The Charter also sets out what colleagues can expect from BCP Council as an employer to support their wellbeing and details our expectations in terms of colleague’s self-care.

Nearly 50% of our employees in social care jobs work flexibly and in a recent survey 83% of our employees felt that their manager was considerate of their home life.

Stress

Bournemouth

Christchurch

Poole

The area has great transport links with excellent rail and road connections nationally. We have direct trains to London and the north of England, international flights from both Bournemouth and Southampton airports and regular ferry services to the Channel Islands and mainland France.

Find out more detailed travel information about: Bournemouth, Christchurch, Poole

Aspire is one of the first regional adoption agencies to be set up in England, and provides adoption and special guardianship services for BCP Council. We work in partnership with Families for Children, a local voluntary adoption agency.

Continuous assessment is a constant feature of good practice from the referral through to case closure.

Social workers sit in four pods with a four-weekly turnaround (the 20-day time limit on assessments).

BCP Council uses a Signs of Safety framework for assessing, based on the simple questions– ‘what are we worried about?’, ‘what’s going well’ and ‘what needs to happen’?

The service is staffed by three teams, with eight personal advisors (PAs) and a team manager in each. The work base for the service is flexible, with options to work in offices across the BCP area and a duty system based from our award winning young people’s hub in the centre of Bournemouth town. PAs support an average of 22 young people each, with close working alongside partners such as housing, health, probation and local voluntary organisations key to our successes.

We are looking for experienced social workers ready to take the next step in their career, or those with management experience already, who have a passion for supporting our personal advisors in their work with young people into early adulthood and beyond. The journey into the world of independence can be challenging for our care experienced young people, and as their corporate parent we want to make sure we give them the best possible foundations. Our ambitions for our young people, and our staff team, are high.

The Child Health and Disabilities service (CHAD) is a specialist service situated in frontline children’s services. Eligibility for the service is based mostly on child’s disability and complexity of needs.

All children are children in need (CIN). The CHAD team will work with families (including siblings if required) where it is identified that support services are needed and are not available at the Universal or Early Help levels.

This includes provision of short breaks away from home and help for those families who are at risk of breakdown without the provision of specialist support services. This does not include short breaks – positive activities.  Level of support, including the visiting pattern, will be assessed on an individual basis.

Our Children & Family First (CFF) service consists of six teams, each consisting of a team manager, assistant team manager , seven social workers and one family support practitioner.

The service works with children and families that transfer from the assessment service, working with the family in a strength based to safeguard children under a child in need plan, or child protection plan. As a social worker within the CFF Service you may also work with children and young people who become looked after until they are either successfully rehabilitated home, or up until the second child looked after review if the plan is for long term care.

All social workers get dedicated 1:1 personal and case supervision alongside group reflective supervision. Within BCP we have an extensive training offer to support the development of all our staff and work closely with Bournemouth University , within our Social Work Teaching Partnership which has well established post qualifying support programme.

Our children in care service consists of four teams, each team manager has responsibility for managing approximately six social workers and caseloads are balanced with an average of 18 children per social worker.  The service works with children from the point of permanency decisions being made and includes supporting unaccompanied asylum seeking children.

Within the children in care teams, we take a balanced approach to managing caseloads with caseloads averaging around 18 per worker.

Early Help is a distributed service, with some staff in the service sitting in the Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH), some in the locality-based family hubs and others providing specialist programmes designed to prevent children from being ‘stepped up’ to more critical interventions.

Early Help 1 (EH1) are the teams providing programmes and supporting school inclusion while in Early Help 2 (EH2), six family support teams and youth support services are based in locality hubs across Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole.

The direction of travel for Early Help is to prevent children needing escalation to social care and to work in support of the team around the school model for the 100+ schools and colleges in BCP, thereby reducing the sense of disengagement some young people feel which may at times lead them into conflict with their school or college.

Our specialist edge of care team was set up in January 2021 after a pilot project to reduce the number of children and young people coming into care. The team is made up of youth workers, adolescent support workers and parent/carer support workers. The purpose of the team is to support young people and their families in order to keep young people out of the care system when being in care is not in their best interests.

Edge of Care support is agreed via a weekly panel and once agreed involvement is for a period of about 12 weeks. The offer is a worker allocated for the young person and a worker for the parents/carers, a restorative and trauma informed approach to repairing relationships within the family, positive activities for the young people and weekly multi agency progress/review meetings to ensure a robust oversight of the plan and agreed actions and to avoid any drift and delay. The edge of care workers do not ‘take over’ from the social worker but work alongside them and involved partners (usually health, education, housing and voluntary and community sector).

In line with national trends, over 70% of children in care in Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole are fostered. Whilst some local authorities deem therapeutic fostering to be a specialist placement, we believe that every foster care placement needs to be therapeutic and to provide a child with a healing environment. We are committed to developing and supporting our carers to provide the very best care to every child entrusted to our care.

Our Fostering Services is comprised of five teams. The teams are generic in accessing and supporting mainstream and connected carers with each team having a specific area of specialism:

• Adolescence
• Initial Enquiries
• Parent and Child
• Shared Carer
• Fostering Duty and Supported Lodgings

The voice of the child is essential in the review and monitoring of fostering families. We work creatively to ensure that the voice of the child is present in the carer’s annual reviews and in work undertaken with our carers. The team have developed several tools to support children of all ages and abilities to tell us their views of how they are being cared for.

We are delighted that the Independent Reviewing Service (IRS) has recently expanded, and we now have 18 IRO/CP chairs. This means that caseloads are in line with the IRO handbook and CP chairs’ caseloads provide the conditions to do impactful work.

We create an environment where our staff undertake their role and responsibilities to a high standard, experience job satisfaction and a good work life balance. The service manager and two team managers have an open door policy and encourage a culture where learning and development is key. Collaborative working in respect of service development within the service and the team is known for being supportive of each other and welcoming to new staff.

We are looking for passionate social workers, experienced in safeguarding that can keep children central in their work. You will thrive on building relationships, working together and can hold professionals to account to get the best for the children that we serve.

We are dedicated to delivering the best we can for our young people and the development and support of our staff is vital in our work; the training and support offered within the service is of a high quality and we aim to lead by example for our young people.

The Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH) uses a duty system. The core team is a duty pod, with social workers and early help practitioners sitting in the pod on a rota and co-located at Poole Police Station. An education worker, domestic abuse worker and a mental health worker will join the duty pod, making a total of six workers in the pod every day.

Each MASH team member is an expert or champion in a specific issue. For example we have a perinatal expert who holds regular meeting with the local midwifery team.

BCP Council has its own Children’s Services Out of Hours team who operate in the evenings and at weekends to ensure that children and families in crisis can continue to access support.

The team works alongside daytime services to respond to the needs of children and young people who may be at risk of harm outside normal working hours.

The work can be varied and it often involves a multi-agency approach, alongside our police and health colleagues, to apply and agree immediate safety planning and actions with families where situations can’t wait for daytime services.

Our Public Law Outline (PLO) and court service consists of two teams, each consisting of a team manager, assistant team manager, six social workers and one family support practitioner. The service will receive cases from the assessment service or children & family first service at point of initiation of PLO or initiation of care proceedings. The team will then work within a strength based manner to support changes required under the PLO process, or if within the court areas, until permanency is achieved.

Within Children’s Services we have a statutory SEND team (for children and young people with the most complex and highest level of need requiring statutory support) and a broader range of services that support SEND such as the Early Years Portage Service, Education Psychology Service (EPS), preparation for adulthood co-ordinator (PfA) and SENDIASS (the arm’s length information and advice service); most of the services across children’s services provide support in different ways to children and young people with SEND and their families.

BCP Council take a graduated response approach so that levels of support increase or decrease with a child or young person’s level of need, as we do across the rest of Children’s Services. For SEND this is set out in the Graduated Response and is set out for three age groups: early years, school age and post 16.