Spring Consortium: Innovation in Children’s Social Care

Our Impact

The demand on the children’s social care system has been rising steadily, with half a million children and young people in England alone receiving support from social care services each year. And across a wide range of indicators, including education, employment, mental health, criminal behaviour and homelessness, children who are in or have left care have significantly worse outcomes than average.

In 2014 the Department for Education (DfE) commissioned Spring Consortium (including Innovation Unit, Deloitte and Mutual Ventures) to be the delivery partner for their Children’s Social Care Innovation Programme. 70 projects covering 90 local authorities were supported in the first two years of the CSC Programme, and more joined throughout 2017, with £155m in funding awarded.

The Approach

Spring Consortium worked with project teams and with the Department for Education through every stage of the Innovation Programme, including designing and running the application process; providing project-specific coaching on innovation, implementation and leadership; and facilitating learning across the Programme to understand how innovation can embed, flourish and scale across the sector.

Projects covered a huge range of topics, including child sexual exploitation, new models of foster care, adoption support and new commissioning models. All projects were rooted in a clear vision and principles that put people and relationships first, ahead of structures, systems or processes.

New approaches in children’s social care need to be tried at every level, in big and small ways: practice innovation that rethinks what happens at the interface between practitioners and families; service innovation that rethinks provision and pathways; and system innovation that rethinks how organisations in a system operate as a whole.