Supporting children to flourish – our pledge

Earlier this month, our children’s homes became formally accredited by Norfolk County Council as making a pledge for the next 12 months (and beyond) to enable children to ‘flourish’.

This is part of a local authority-run initiative across Norfolk to ensure that children have a voice which is heard, regardless of their background or start in life.

Through the scheme, we have formally pledged to include children in a minimum of 80% of our children's home recruitment needs per annum, either through a young person’s panel, co-designing job adverts and specifications, refining interview questions or co-hosting a meet and greet at the home.

This is one of the many projects underway across our children’s homes service to ensure we’re doing all we can to support the best interests of the young people we care for, and to help them towards positive outcomes.

A new position of ‘children’s homes development manager’ was created to oversee this broader work in August, with former ‘responsible individual’ Rob Peduto appointed to the role.

Rob explains, “Our Flourish accreditation is a positive step forward, and a reflection of our commitment to being a child-led organisation.

“By committing to a tangible target of including children in 80% of our homes’ recruitment needs, we can measure and evaluate our efforts, and continually plan to improve. Recruitment is a perfect way to focus on this. Many of the ‘standard’ recruitment processes aren’t always appropriate for the roles we need filled in our homes. We’re creating homes for young people who are vulnerable, who have faced trauma and challenge and who need to feel safe and cared for. It’s critical that we have the right people working for us who can create these environments and relationships, and what better way to understand who our applicants are, than introducing them to the young people they could be supporting (when safe and appropriate to do so), right from the start of the process.

“It’s a privilege to work on these kinds of projects as part of my new role. We’ve gone from running one home to four homes, which is huge growth, but also huge responsibility. Our work must be built on solid foundations, so were looking at how we future proof our services, how we develop staff and managers, and how we’re set up to be the best we can be.

“I want our residential support workers and our home managers to be able to focus on supporting the young people in their care, with efficient systems around them. We’re fantastic at this already – as evidenced by our recent Ofsted reports, but I want us to be better, and ultimately further enhance the experiences of our young people.”