Children in care sufficiency strategy
Meeting the placement needs of children in care
Our sufficiency strategy sets out our approach to providing sufficient high-quality accommodation to children in care and care leavers that they can call home over the next 5 years.
The document identifies the 6 nurture principles that have been adapted for the sufficiency strategy, to focus on children and young people having a place to call their home to help them to develop, grow and become the best person they can possibly be. It sets out the different home environments available to our children and young people, dependent on their assessed level of need, and our strategic approach to meet future demand.
Our aims are:
- to fulfil our statutory obligations to children in care, children in need and care leavers to ensure that our children and young people live in safe accommodation with care and support
- to make sure we always deliver the best value for money and we can support providers in developing innovation in services to meet the needs of our children and young people
- to manage demand and the increasingly complex needs of our young people through allocation into the appropriate schemes, supported with a robust safeguarding approach
- to offer best value and maximise resources to improve outcomes for young people, in line with our vision
- to ensure young people have the ability to live independently by achieving self-supporting independence when they reach adulthood
- to make sure opportunities are explored to enable children and young people to make their voices heard.
Throughout the life of this document we will continue to work with our children in care, care leavers and key partners to develop our plans and priorities. There will be six-monthly reviews and oversight from our Corporate Parenting Panel to ensure the strategy remains as relevant until 2027 as it does now.
The week in which this strategy was finalised, the threshold for Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Children in a Children in Care population increased from 0.07% to 0.1%. This will have an impact on future forecast demand, in various accommodation types, so further data analysis for future forecasts will take place at the next scheduled review.