Cared for, Safeguarded and Healthy-Sector-Led Improvement Budget Proposal

Leading Sector-led Improvement
North Tyneside has developed a national reputation for the quality of its children’s services, including receiving Partners in Practice status from the Department for Education and the opportunity to deliver sector-led improvement to other authorities in the country. This work will develop a long-term offer for SLI as well as exploring opportunities to provide ad hoc and bespoke support to authorities that seek it from us. This will bring additional income.
North of Tyne Collaboration on Social Care; in addition to our work on education and skills, under the auspices of devolution, we have developed a programme of work to collaborate on children’s social care services. We will develop a plan to work more closely on practical proposals that we think will make a difference, with initial opportunities relating to our response to domestic abuse, workforce planning and quality, and elements of our services for looked after children. This will aim to share costs and invest together.

• A New Model to Support Children: national policy direction, inspection and demand pressures are creating an environment where local authorities are looking at alternative models to deliver services to support children, including collaboration. This project aims to review best practice and the alternatives to our current approach. It will continue to explore the capability to grow direct provision as the dynamics of the market change and our capability to deliver specialist housing and support grows. This means a continuation of the "Transforming Children's services" programme which includes increasing the accommodation available to improve the early help offer and reduce the demand for external residential placements, with the potential to trade surplus capacity.

• Delivering our Accommodation Strategy for social care; early work on the Cabinet’s Affordable Homes Programme has demonstrated the Authority’s ability to deliver specialist housing which supports independent living and reduces costs. This proposal aims to continue to shape our housing growth plans to include specialist housing products and services for children and adults with additional needs, Looked After Children and older people. We have had significant success with recent developments at Mitford Gardens and Elm House, which have also proven better value for money than external options, and the joint team with commissioning, housing and social care expertise that was created for this work will continue to explore opportunities to develop a range of other internal accommodation services in line with our strategy in order to save costs on existing pilot work to deliver at scale. Specifically the accommodation strategy for looked after children and care leavers is focused on keeping children and young people connected to their communities, maintaining relationships with families and support networks, and promoting independent living.