No Wrong Door: Transforming cultures in and beyond children’s social care

Our impact

The number of children in care is at a record high, while Local Authorities and councils are struggling to fund their statutory requirements. For many children, families, system leaders and practitioners, the current care system simply isn’t working.

No Wrong Door® (NWD) is a tried-and-tested approach, developed by North Yorkshire County Council (NYCC), that works with adolescents who are in care or on the edge of care. Originally developed as part of the Department for Education’s Children’s Social Care Innovation Programme, this approach is being implemented by several other local authorities including Bradford, Middlesbrough, Sheffield, and six authorities in Greater Manchester. Innovation Unit and NYCC are working in partnership to help local authorities adopt and adapt this new approach to their local system.

Independently evaluated by Loughborough University, NWD in North Yorkshire worked with 355 young people, 67% through outreach work. The model demonstrated significant financial savings, improved outcomes for young people and reductions in children being looked after.

The Approach

Our current role, working in partnership with NYCC, is to support each local authority adopting the innovation in understanding the NWD vision and values, practice and culture, interrogating the NWD ways of working, and adapting these for their local context. We use a learning and coaching approach which aims to build capability, build a shared understanding of the project’s vision, desired outcomes and design principles, and focus on the specific needs of locality’s young people.

Through the DfE Innovation programme we’ve provided coaching support to the team adopting of the NWD model in Bradford as part of the B Positive Pathways project (also including the Mockingbird fostering model), in Sheffield, in Middlesbrough, and now in six local authorities across Greater Manchester: Manchester, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, Trafford, and Wigan.