COV - The Provision of Residential Placements for Children and Young People with Complex Needs and Behaviours - FAILED

The City Council has a statutory duty to provide accommodation to young people and children under 18 who have been assessed as requiring accommodation under the Children Act 1989. Children's homes provide support and care for some of our most vulnerable children and young people. We want each child in care to be provided with the right placement at the right time, and for residential childcare to be a positive and beneficial choice for the children and young people living in children's homes.

On average, Coventry currently has an average of 79 Looked After Children in residential provision per year. Of this cohort 10-15% of the children have presenting needs that make them hard to source placements for. The children within this cohort are hard to place for a number of reasons including increased aggression, gang affiliation, risk of CSE, and multi-placement breakdowns. The majority of children are male aged between 14-16 years.

Coventry Children's Services are implementing Family Valued, relational-based practice in all the work that we do; this extends to the relationship-based approach we want to build with our providers, moving away from traditional transactional procurement.

Coventry City Council is seeking to secure a minimum of 8 and a maximum of 15 residential placements per year in which we can place some of our most vulnerable children and young people, those with complex needs and difficult behaviours. This will be a flexible framework to allow us to reopen the framework each year (or as required) to secure a small number of providers who can commit to supplying up to 15 places between them each year. However, these places do not all have to be available at the start of the year; with placements coming available at various points in the year. This contract is looking for providers that know they will have existing placements ending within the 12-month period and wish to offer Coventry the option of placing one of our children when the bed becomes vacant, or who are creating new provision that will come available within the 12-month period and will give Coventry the first chance to secure the places available. In applying to join this framework the provider must be able to provide placements and will have the opportunity to state how many places they can offer and when they are likely to come available - staggered offers of places across the year are preferable. Providers should be able to offer a minimum of 2 placements in the 12-month period.

Additional information: Is a Recurrent Procurement Type? : Yes