Facilitator for people with lived experience of care - Engaging the un-engaged

On the week of 23rd May, the previous Minister for Children and Families announced the actions we are taking now to improve children's social care, including the publication of an implementation strategy, as well as:

Working with local authorities to boost efforts to recruit more foster carers, ensuring children have access to the right placements at the right time;

Refocussing the support for social workers in the early part of their careers, particularly to enhance their skills and knowledge in child protection;

Joining up data from across the public sector to increase transparency - both between safeguarding partners and to the wider public;

Develop a National Children's Social Care Framework, which will set direction for the

system and point everyone to the best available evidence.

The recommendations in these reports are ambitious, complex and wide-ranging, and we must consider them carefully. The Department has committed to engaging with those with lived experience of care as well as the sector to inform our work on implementation and ensure our reforms truly deliver for our vulnerable children and their families.

The Department has run a separate exercise with key children's charities to co-create with the department sessions to engage with those with lived experience of the care system.

Alongside, we keen to appoint an organisation to work with us specifically on reaching those groups who are harder to engage and who may not be easily be covered by our wider engagement work. We are looking for a bidder who understands and has previous experience of the workings of children's social care and in particular of those with lived experience of the care system.

This post is an essential role in implementing the new children's social care reforms. The post holder will facilitate and run, virtually or face to face, effective, inclusive sessions and engagement with people with lived experience of the care system, to support them to feed in views and influence implementation of reforms. Each session will have a specific focus on various aspects of the reform implementation- to be confirmed in partnership with the DfE.

The initial contract duration is 12 months to align with the proposed consultation periods.