Council Spotlight Slough Children’s Services Trust was established in October 2015. Over the past three years, the team has worked hard to evolve the services which were recently praised by Ofsted for “making significant progress” and “delivering improved results.” We speak exclusively with Lisa Humphreys, Chief Executive from Slough Children’s Services Trust, to find out more about how they have changed their approach and what this means for children living in the Borough.
The concept of a Trust is still a relatively new concept for many social workers. Can you explain what this means, and how the working approach differs from traditional children’s services? A Trust is an alternative delivery model for providing improved services for children’s statutory services. It means a close partnership with the Local Authority working together on key objectives. The key benefit of the Trust model is that every single person within our organisation is here for the same reason – to improve the lives of local vulnerable children and help make them safe, secure and successful. We’re an independent company but we still work very closely with Slough Borough Council; this partnership is vital to our continuing progress but the fact we are more self-contained means we are more agile as an organisation, with quicker decisionmaking and we’re also able to try different ways of working more easily.
Part of the move towards the Trust meant developing a new company culture. Unlike
We run several innovative programmes, such as traditional children’s services, Pause for vulnerable mothers, who repeatedly have you do not have as much of a children taken into care and Inspiring Families which management ‘hierarchy’ within takes a holistic approach to domestic abuse. Our your leadership team. Has overall strategic aim is to offer a range of services which provide active support and help to children this improved efficiency, and and their families. how have your practitioners responded to this? Your vision is to ensure that all children within the care system Developing our culture has been essential to our improvement journey and it’s something that’s feel “safe, secure and successful” continually evolving. – can you explain how this vision is being communicated I want our staff to be confident that they can raise concerns at any time, and they’ll be supported. to employees and what I hold regular staff surgeries, there are comment support is available to enable boxes at our offices and there’s also an anonymous social workers to meet these online comments form. I feel it is important to expectations? be visible and available to staff. I remain close to frontline practice and take an avid interest in day-today events for our children, families and workforce.
The vision underlies everything we do and is based upon a strengths-based systemic model which
"Our children and care leavers are exactly that - our children. We aim to show them how proud we are, just like any parent." Social Work News - 30
