Sefton Council has successfully secured £3m of new funding to improve the support it offers to children, young people and families across the Borough. The Council is working in partnership with Leeds City Council to deliver the ‘Leeds Family Valued’ model, part of the Government’s Strengthening Families, Protecting Children programme.

The partnership will launch in Spring 2022 and will last for an initial two years. The aims of the programme are to improve outcomes for children and families, improve practice across children’s services, improve the effectiveness of the local authorities’ children’s social work and safely reduce the need for statutory social work intervention, particularly reducing the need for children to be looked after.

Specifically, the Family Valued model aims to bring about wide-ranging improvements across Children’s Social Care across several areas including culture change, leadership and practice. The ambition is to embed restorative practice further across the children’s workforce; beyond Sefton’s children’s services and into partner agencies across the Borough, with the recognition that practitioners play a key role in preventative approaches and culture change.

This funding is in addition to a £10m investment announced by Sefton Council in 2021 to deliver key improvements across Children’s Social Care which is already helping to deliver increased capacity across several teams, reduce caseloads and bolster recruitment and retention efforts.

Welcoming the successful funding bid, Cllr. Mhairi Doyle, Sefton Council’s Cabinet Member for Children’s Social Care said:

“I am delighted that Sefton Council has been awarded this evaluated programme and I would like to thank all of those involved in putting together a strong bid to The Department for Education.

“We want all children, young people and families across Sefton to be heard, happy, healthy and achieving, and the Family Valued programme will enable us to deliver key improvements across Children’s Social Care that will ultimately allow us to achieve these aims.

“Working closely with the team at Leeds City Council will ensure colleagues across Sefton have access to a range of training, development work on various aspects of practice and leadership & management development opportunities.

“I look forward to this partnership bringing professionals across the Borough even closer together for the benefit of all of our children, young people and families.”