How to Commission So Practitioners Can Actually Help Families
Every local authority leader I speak to wants the same thing:A system that stops firefighting and starts preventing harm.
Why trauma informed early help is essential to reducing knife crime
There are moments when evidence lands with such clarity that it becomes impossible to “unsee”. New national findings by Dr Tom Roberts and...
Children’s Early Help Isn’t a Service. It’s a System Behaviour
There is no term more widely used, and more widely misunderstood, in local authority children’s services than early help. Every strategy...
Commissioning Models Are Turning Expensive Resource into Sign Posters
Every local authority has one resource that dwarfs every other line in the budget: Your workforce. Not your providers.Not your commissioned...
Why “We’ve Already Got a Provider” Isn’t a Commissioning Strategy
There is a sentence I hear in almost every local authority I work with: “We’ve already got a provider for that.”
How Children’s Services End Up Busy but Not Effective
If you work in a local authority today, you don’t need another report to tell you demand is rising, complexity is increasing and scrutiny...
Commissioning a Service Isn’t Commissioning System Change for Children
You can meet every statutory duty, commission a “good” local provider, and still watch demand rise, crises spike, and scrutiny tighten. I...