Practice guides

Lancashire County Council's Pause and Reflect (PAR) Fostering arrangements ensure the fostering service can meet its sufficiency duty to provide the right homes for children, regardless of the complexity of their needs, amidst a national foster carer shortage. The journey to creating PAR began in 2022 with recognition of the need for a responsive and supportive system to offer immediate stability and emotional support to children, regardless of complexity of need, reducing the need for out-of-area and high-cost homes. The development process involved extensive research and consultations with experienced foster carers. A gradual increase in carers offering PAR, combined with feedback from these initial experiences, was instrumental in shaping the final, effective, and practical PAR model. Launched in February 2024, it provides enhanced fostering arrangements for children with complex needs. It offers a stable home for up to 28 days to allow children to reduce dysregulation and express their needs, promoting empowerment in their care journey.

Fathers play a crucial yet often under-recognised role in the lives of their children, contributing significantly to emotional well-being, social development, and educational outcomes. Despite this, many support services across the UK have historically struggled to engage fathers effectively, often due to systemic barriers and entrenched stereotypes. This practice guide outlines Halton’s commitment to embedding father-inclusive approaches within Family Help and Children’s Social Care. It highlights the rationale for change, the steps taken to improve service design and delivery, and the positive impact of these efforts on families and practitioners. By promoting fathers as essential caregivers and creating welcoming, inclusive environments, Halton aims to ensure that all parents—regardless of gender—are supported to play an active role in their children’s lives.

There is a general lack of sufficiency for care provision locally, including foster care, which is driving up costs from private providers, and meaning children are accessing residential provision that does not always best meet their needs. We have observed an increasing trend of young with complex, multifaceted needs who require simultaneous support from a wide range of different professionals and agencies. These increases are causing cost pressures, due to young people having to be externally placed. These are all young people that the local authority believe could have been supported by the Complex
Needs Hub to secure more timely and proportionate support, potentially at a lower cost. In terms of its financial ambitions, the Complex Needs Hub aims reduce spend on external agency placements and internal placements via its Outreach programme that aims to support young people to remain at home in the care of their family.

Liverpool has the second highest rate of Looked After Children in the North West with 155 per 10, 000 0–17-year-olds. Parental mental health issues were identified as one of the most significant factors contributing to higher levels of children entering care. We wanted to work with parents to improve their
mental health and parenting skills to support more children to remain within the care of their families. We had previously trained social workers in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) driving some improvement, yet without securing sustainable change. For families who were receiving the high levels of
intervention, including those involved in Public Law Outline, and not evidencing change were offered the Fiona Programme.

Domestic abuse services have grown rapidly within Cheshire East over the last 5 years, due to enhanced funding from local partners as well as through national funding streams. Over 2024/25, the Cheshire East DA Strategy was reviewed and a full Needs Assessment commissioned, which highlighted gaps in provision as well as the need to focus on early intervention. This development ran alongside the introduction of the Domestic Abuse Act 2024 and the increased responsibility of Local Authorities to support victims of DA, as well as treating children as victims in their own right. The Domestic Abuse Family Safety Unit (DAFSU) team began as an Independent Domestic Abuse Advocate (IDVA) at the ‘Hub’ (an identified referral route via phone and/or an online portal); as well as a small number of high risk IDVAs taking referrals directly from MARAC meetings. The Hub developed into a wider team, offering advice, information and education around DA, as well as risk assessment (using the DASH Risk Assessment Checklist) and onward referral where appropriate. The high-risk team also developed and became a dedicated resource for victims at the highest risk.

Salford has a Flexible Procurement Solution (FPS) for Alternative Provision (AP). We operate a system of commissioning unregistered and registered AP, inviting providers to tender for inclusion on our framework. This is an effective flexible procurement process, which offers wide and varied alternative
education programmes. This was reviewed and updated for September 2024 so that there is a wider offer available. The FPS is used to identify AP providers who can deliver excellent alternative provision for the education of pupils from Key Stage 1 and beyond by offering a flexible response to those not
placed in a mainstream or special school. The FPS is used to commission AP placements for the local authority, including SEND and s19 Education Act provision, and by schools. Most of the pupils will be accessing the alternative education provision, which is delivered alongside the school’s core curriculum offer, on a part-time basis.

At the heart of our development was a desire to enable young people to have a voice and focus on giving young people the opportunity to inspect services they use and give critical and constructive feedback to services, projects, funders, organisations, or bodies that provide services to young
people in the borough. The Young Inspectors programme in Blackburn with Darwen has been developed from national guidance, to better serve our local needs. Young Inspectors contribute positively to improving key local services- thereby directly improving outcomes and experiences. The Blackburn with Darwen Young Inspectors Framework was co-produced with young people – with senior management support and guidance including to develop scoring matrices.

To ensure high standards in the delivery of Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) and SEND support, Blackburn with Darwen has implemented a comprehensive five-tier quality assurance framework. This approach combines quantitative, qualitative, and impact-based methods to evaluate and improve practice across services. Each tier focuses on a different aspect of assurance—from individual service-level checks and compliance audits using digital tools, to capturing lived experiences, conducting multi-agency reviews, and reporting to governance boards—ensuring a robust and holistic process for continuous improvement.

Cheshire East was identified as an outlier for the number and rate of growth of children with Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) and involved with the Delivering Better Value for SEND (DBV) programme at the time of bidding for Family Hubs funding. The Family Hub partnership group committed to developing a Family Hubs as a SEND Centre of Excellence to trial and develop inclusive practice across all Cheshire East Family Hubs. We collaborated with partners and families to discuss what the centre could look like; this included young people who supported us to design the space. Our Parent Carer Forum (PCF) were key partners on our steering group and regularly informed us about challenges they faced, gaps in service provision, and changes needed to provide effective support.

In Manchester, we have developed a steering group Manchester Inclusive Alternative Provision Strategy
(MIAPS) for both alternative provision and schools. Our rationale is founded on principles of inclusion:

• Ensuring all settings are compliant with all relevant legislation and statutory standards.
• Ensuring that all young people in all settings are safe and visible.
• Ensuring that all young people have access to high-quality provision and education.
• Enabling Alternative Provision (AP) settings to sit as a community asset to support collaborative,
continuous improvement.
• Secure lasting relationships with all stakeholders and support self-improvement through robust
quality processes.

We approached oversight of AP settings by creating a Manchester City Council framework of Approved Alternative Provision Providers. We produced a Manchester guide for schools using alternative provision and developed a quality assurance framework and protocol, which has informed national
guidance. Commissioning of an AP Quality Assurance professional ensured completion quality assurance visits and generation of reports. Alongside this, funding of the IRIS Adapt system enabled schools and provider to support oversight of young people in AP settings.

Sefton’s approach to Alternative Provision (AP) needed to be developed through the principles outlined in the Department for Education’s SEND and alternative provision improvement plan: right support, right place, right time. This required us to align AP with the wider SEND system more fully, ensuring pupils with additional needs received appropriate support within a structured and accountable framework.

There are a higher-than-average number of children and young people in Oldham who have an education, health, and care plan (EHCP) compared to national rates (Oldham: 6.0% and national: 4.8%). The most common type of need for children and young people with an EHCP is autism, although speech, language and communication needs (SLCN) remain a significant area of need, which is shown in the most common primary need for children and young people at the SEN Support level being SLCN. Furthermore, most children at primary transition who move to special schools have primary needs in SLCN and autism. Due of the challenges of rising demand and many referrals for speech and language therapy (SALT) leading to long waiting times, it was important to look at reducing this.