No matter where

Community of practice

CoramBAAF provides membership, training, advice, consultancy and practice publications to support all children’s services authorities and agencies across the UK in fulfilling their duties and securing consistent high quality services for children through adoption, fostering and kinship arrangements.

A new advisory forum on kinship care was formed to guide further practice development and calls to our specialist advice line grew by 13% reflecting the increasing complexity of cases.

54,206 PROFESSIONALS

Coram Innovation Incubator

The Coram Innovation Incubator unites the expertise of Coram, Microsoft, EY, and PA Consulting with 10 member local authorities to identify and address the challenges being faced in children’s social care.

The Innovation Collective report brings together a digest of innovation across the country and this year we launched the first Innovation Inset programme to build capacity for change and tackle specific problems from the ground up.

Innovation projects are now tackling access to care records and life story needs, social worker retention, and foster care capacity. More at www.coram-i.org.uk.

When Aneesha, Head of MASH, Referral & Assessment and EDT for Bromley joined the Innovation Inset, they were facing a common problem for local authorities of high turnover amongst social workers. “We thought the problem

CoramBAAF published three good practice guides and four books to address practice needs and reached 54,206 subscribing professionals across all four nations of the UK. Dr Dennis Golm, Lecturer in Psychology at the Centre for Innovation in Mental Health at the University of Southampton, became the lay with our recruitment practices. The sessions helped us to think about the issue in different ways. We started looking at staff welfare and what we could do to make the lives of our social workers better.” Changing the approach to flexible hours has now made a difference and is being replicated across departments.

In the coming year we will welcome new kindred members – including Barnardo’s, Grosvenor, and Frontline - to the Innovation Incubator.

new Editor-in-Chief of Adoption and Fostering Journal

Training featured the delivery of early permanence practice for Regional Adoption Agency professionals and innovations included a specialist webinar for Social Work Week on Writing about children – recognising how language can impact a child’s journey as well as sessions on how professionals can support the LGBTQ+ community to become foster carers.

Churchill Fellowship

For the first time, the Churchill Fellowship – with support from the Hadley Trust – is supporting 30 fellows over three years to explore international practice and develop plans to improve the lives of children and young people with experience of care, with applications particularly encouraged from people with experience of care themselves. Coram is proud to be the knowledge partner to the programme to share learning and drive change.

Research in action

Coram continues to be at the forefront of research and evaluation into the voice of children, young people and their parents/carers and in supporting services to demonstrate their impact. We work with a range of organisations including the Children’s Commissioner, the Local Government Association, the NHS and Integrated Care Partnerships, Violence Reduction Units and others.

Funded by the What Works for Early Intervention and Children’s Social Care this year Coram completed the world’s largest ever randomised control trial examining the impact of Family Group Conferences in pre-proceedings across 21 local authorities analysing data for over 2,500 children.

Parent Champions

Coram Family and Childcare run parent-led programmes, including Parent Champions, to improve marginalised communities’ access to information and services.

Parent Champions are trained and supported to provide practical help to families in understanding their rights and how to go about accessing childcare and other support and services. This year 274 volunteers reached almost 30,000 parents.

Carol Bennett, Parent Champion & Social Media Coordinator Wandsworth Participatory and Community Engagement said:

“Our Parent Champions programme has made such a difference in encouraging local families to take up their childcare entitlement. Just having someone with experience, speaking from one parent to another really helps.”

By convening and supporting the National Association of Family Information Services, we also enable and support the consistency and quality of information and support to families.

21,585 PARENTS/CARERS (4,990 IN 2022) AN INCREASE OF 333%

The findings were referenced in the government’s response to the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care and can be found at www.coram.org.uk.

The randomised controlled trial on therapeutic approaches to life story work in three local authorities in the North East was also published with a discussion conference attended by social workers, researchers, therapists and other practitioners: whatworks-csc. org.uk/wp-content/uploads/CLSW-RCTFinal-Report-19-Dec_acc.pdf.

In January 2023, the Children’s Commissioner published new analysis by Coram on responses from children in care to The Big Ask survey, the largest ever conducted with children. Coram’s analysis of the 2,261 responses from children in care found that their level of happiness was broadly similar to that of children in general, although they are overall more worried than peers about education, family relationships and where they live: www.coram.org.uk/ resource/findings-from-the-big-askchildren-in-care.

In the coming year we will be conducting a further randomised controlled trial of the impact of the Barnardo’s emotional wellbeing and mental health support model for foster and kinship carers in addition to evaluating our own programmes, such as our co-produced Young Citizens programme for young refugees and migrants, to inform and enhance their impact.