In 2018 myself and colleagues at Norfolk County Council recognised the need for a different approach to meeting the needs of the children and young people in our care. We wanted to be more ambitious and aspirational for our children. In practice we found it difficult to understand and capture children's needs and strengths consistently.

As part of our response to these challenges, we started working with IMPOWER and a group of local authorities to implement and apply IMPOWER's ‘Valuing Care' approach which allows holistic needs and strengths to be consistently assessed and understood by practitioners, children and families. This approach allows needs to be tracked over time, used to get the right support in place and connected to the costs of care.

Fast forward five years and Valuing Care has played an important part in improving the lives and life chances of a significant number of children and young people in Norfolk. Valuing Care has contributed to a range of achievements in Norfolk including:

• Supporting more children and young people to live safely at home, with a significant decrease in the number of children who are looked after in Norfolk

• Providing a greater choice of homes and support for children and young people, better matched to their needs

• Mitigating our sufficiency challenges and delivering a reduction in the cost of some forms of care eg, an approximately 11% reduction in the average cost of external foster care for 0-13-year-olds since 2021 (taking into account inflationary fee increases)

• Improving consistency and quality of practice – as recognised by our recent move from ‘Requires Improvement' to ‘Good' in our recent Ofsted inspection

• Growing the capacity of our in-house fostering service, achieving a 14% increase in the utilisation of our foster carers, and a 30% increase in new family-based placements in Norfolk in 2022-23 (compared with the previous year).

For the first time, Norfolk is able to bring together information on needs, support, cost and outcomes to understand the impact of care on children's lives over time and to put in place the right interventions and plans. And our children and young people have welcomed an approach which puts the emphasis on their needs, strengths and aspirations in the ‘here and now' rather than discussion of deficits or ‘case history'.

Norfolk is part of the Valuing Care Programme – a partnership of local areas that is using Valuing Care to improve children's lives and life chances, including those who have implemented and embedded the approach such as Hertfordshire, Oxfordshire and Lincolnshire. From improving how local areas find the right care and support for children, to helping find family homes for more children that need them, this approach is making a demonstrable difference.

Key to the success of this programme has been an ongoing commitment to sharing learning, impact and expertise between Norfolk, IMPOWER and the group of local authorities participating in the programme.

We believe that this approach could be replicated in other areas and at a regional or national level. Valuing Care could provide the foundation of an alternative approach to commissioning and sufficiency at a regional level – with the emphasis on collaboration and common approaches across shared data and insight on needs, costs and outcomes.

In the context of the proposals in the Government's children's social care strategy, this is the right moment to bring together more local areas to further develop this approach – and to realise the opportunity it can deliver.

On behalf of Norfolk, IMPOWER and the other areas on the programme, we would like to invite other leaders and practitioners working with children and families to get involved in Valuing Care by joining the programme and/or attending an upcoming event sharing insight and learning on this needs and strengths-led approach. In support of this, we will be shortly sharing a publication we have developed together and welcome your response.

Sara Tough is Executive Director of Children's Services at Norfolk County Council

This article is sponsored content for The MJ