Foster Care Support

Providing skilled and experienced foster care in Birmingham, Cheshire West and Chester through a person-centred approach.

  • Location

    Birmingham

  • Launch

    Sep 2014

  • Area

    Fostering & Adoption

Collaborators & funding partners

  • Birmingham City Council

  • Cheshire West & Chester Council

  • Life Chances Fund

Delivery Partners

  • Outcomes for Children, Core Assets Group

  • Foster Care Associates

  • ACS

Team

Collaborators & funding partners

  • Birmingham City Council

  • Cheshire West & Chester Council

  • Life Chances Fund

Delivery Partners

  • Outcomes for Children, Core Assets Group

  • Foster Care Associates

  • ACS

  • Mila founded and leads Bridges Outcomes Partnerships (BOP). At BOP, we work to radically improve human services and environmental initiatives to improve outcomes for people and value for society. Programmes BOP supports are dedicated to empowering people across the world to improve their lives, in areas ranging from education and wellbeing to housing, child protection, employment and environmental protection. Mila is on boards of Positive Families Partnership, Stronger Families, Forward, North East Lincolnshire Thrive, Ways to Wellness, Education Outcomes Partnerships, along with other family, employment, and refugee support focused programmes.

    Mila is also a Trustee for Clore Social Leadership, organisation dedicated to providing social leaders with world class leadership development.

    Prior to Bridges, Mila’s career spanned public, private, and third sector. Mila helped create and run Education Generation, a crowdsourcing social enterprise focused on enabling young leaders in low-and middle-income countries to participate in some of the world’s most forward-thinking education programmes.

  • Andrew is Co-Founder of Bridges Outcomes Partnerships and Executive Director of Operations, Innovation and Learning. He is a Director of Kirklees Better Outcomes Partnership, GM Homes Partnership, Homelessness Support, the Single Homeless Prevention Service and is a Trustee of West London Zone.

    Prior to Bridges, Andrew was Managing Director of a social enterprise “Baobab” in Madagascar, and a non-Executive board member of two other financial inclusion social enterprises, in Senegal and China.

Overview

Foster Care Support was a pioneering foster placement scheme in Birmingham supporting young people transitioning from residential care to a family placement.

In partnership with Polaris Community (previously Core Assets Group), a leading provider of social care services for children and young people, the Foster Care Support model offered a structured, intensive foster placement specifically designed for young people transitioning from residential care to a family placement.

Skilled and experienced foster carers were supported with a wrap-around team of professionals and the intervention was delivered through a structured, phased approach lasting for one year, tailored to fit the needs of each child.

This new approach created both direct impact on young people – supporting them into stable family placements that would significantly boost their life chances in comparison – as well as systemic impact – trialling new policy and commissioning models, avoiding or reducing potential poor health or education outcomes, and saving over £300k per child to the taxpayer.

Outcomes for Children, a social enterprise within the Core Assets Group, delivered the service, aiming to find stable family foster placements for young people in residential care in the Birmingham area.

Outcomes

Foster Care Support pioneered an innovative new approach to foster placement, while also directly impacting 50+ individuals who took part in the programme.

  • 52

    Starts to the programme

  • 20252

    Foster care days delivered

  • £4.0m

    Outcomes achieved

  • £6.8m

    Value to Government