Children Looked After Case Study

CASE STUDY

A County Council identified £ 9.9m of annual savings by optimising fostering services, and re-designing residential and supported accommodation service models.

Situation

The County Council faced rising Children Looked After costs with independent fostering agencies (IFAs) expenditure more than doubling in three years and residential placements increasingly going out-of-county at premium costs. The in-house fostering service was at capacity and children with complex needs were being pushed to residential placements due to less availability of skilled foster carers.

Public Alchemy was commissioned to develop an evidence-based transformation strategy that would enable the local authority to meet the needs of more children and young people within the county while reducing reliance on expensive external placements.

Objectives

Develop data-driven CLA needs forecasting and cost modelling across all placement types.

Identify savings through strategic capacity planning and optimised commissioning of the independent market.

Create sustainable transformation roadmaps that improve the outcomes of children and young people while increasing financial sustainability.

How we developed a strategy to defy foster carer shortages and avoid residential placements

Children Looked After Needs Forecasting & Placement Cost Modelling

Developing needs forecasts and costs per placement type defined the future pressures that need to be met by the Children Looked After transformation strategy:

Analysed 5-year historic placement trends to create quarterly forecast per placement type.
Quantified the cost per placement for each type of fostering, residential and supported accommodation placement.
Forecasted and identified root cause for £17 M increase in annual expenditure to define transformation strategy priorities.

Case Reviews & Root Cause Analysis

Combining data deep dives with individual reviews of cases to identify the root causes for increasing complexity of need:

Mapped care journey pathways to identify fostering breakdown of 12-15s as the root cause of residential demand.
Reviewed individual cases of children’s homes placements, identifying 35% of them as avoidable with enhanced fostering capacity and capability.
Identified 91% of IFA placements as having “standard needs” that could be met within in-house fostering

Business Case Creation

Linking operational findings with financial data to create business cases and benefits profiles with clear, on-the-ground KPIs:

Modelled £5.6M annual savings potential from specialist foster carer programme aimed at preventing 1 child avoiding a residential placement every 2 months.
Identified £1.1M cost avoidance from creating emergency beds to eliminate 661 nights of unregulated placements annually.
Modelled capital investment ROI of under 2 years for supported accommodation property acquisition saving £400K annually.

Service Model Redesign

Designing integrated delivery models that optimise capacity, improve outcomes and reduce external market dependency:

Optimised foster carer fee structure to enable higher complexities of needs to be supported in in-house fostering.
Re-designed fostering placement process to proactively use IFA market as a method of increasing fostering capacity.
Created supported accommodation model to reduce out-of-county high needs placements.

Impact

Children to avoid residential placements in future through implementation of specialist foster carers trained to support complex needs.

£6.9M

Of annual savings identified to be delivered by LA through new fostering strategy that avoids independent and out-of-county placements.

£2.6M

Of savings identified to be delivered by LA through reduction of unregulated residential placements and improved independent provider commissioning.