Consulting services

Improving practice and enabling change

Do you need help to interpret the Every Child Matters agenda in a way that is meaningful to your everyday practice? Do your policies and practice manuals need updating? Are you looking for ways to meet your continuous quality improvement objectives? Or do you need help in planning and managing a project?

Child-Centred Practice offers bespoke consulting on a range of topics including improving practice; enabling change; research projects; and updating and implementing policy and procedures. Contact us to discuss your specific requirements.

We will work with you to make sense of:

The National Assessment Framework
The Common Assessment Framework
Evidence-based practice
Research in Action
Linking key performance indicators to everyday outcomes for children

We offer the following range of strategic services:

Architectural road maps for further electronic social care records for children, ICS, contact point, common assessment and case management systems
Planning workshops to prioritise and develop the next steps in continuing the implementation and improvement of case management systems and practice
Briefing papers and workshops on the impact of the latest government developments, ICS implementation and practice issues
Mapping pathways for locality working and multi-agency teams
Change management for implementation projects
Project management support including the development of project initiation documents and plans

We focus on practitioners working in partnership with children, young people and their families by:

Using a child-focused holistic framework
Identifying strengths and needs through evidence-based analysis
Developing solutions and strategies for change using care planning
Evaluating and providing evidence for the effectiveness of their interventions through service and user reviews
Encouraging practitioners to use their evidence to build up a picture of local needs that can be collated and fed into the commissioning process to effect long term change to services

Research

Child Centred Practice offers the following range of research services. It is not intended to be exhaustive as social work research methodology can be applied to a range of different projects within the sector:

Evaluation of implementations of ICS, Common Assessment Framework or other case management systems to identify successes, learning opportunities and next steps

Literature searches on case management practice systems (such as ICS, family group conferencing, IT buddies, e-learning, housing for young people leaving care) to provide current information for strategic development of services

Surveys of staff and/or service users to test the success of different case management tools

“Jo Fox managed this major project at the interface of social work practice and ICT by ensuring that all our stakeholders were (and felt) appropriately consulted and could see their impact on the project. These involved staff, senior managers, members and government.

Within the structure of a tightly managed plan, she delivered an initiative widely recognised as a national example of how to implement systems to both promote efficiency and improve practice.”

Charles Proctor, County Manager, Performance, & Project Sponsor Integrated Children’s System, Cumbria County Council