Norfolk in Care Council projects

Our groups have worked on, and successfully completed, many projects.

Life Story Work animation

Our groups have created an animation about Life Story Work. This helps to train workers on what we want from it.

Young people met with senior social workers to discuss improvements to life story work across Norfolk Children Services. They also discussed digital life story work with a University of East Anglia (UEA) researcher. One young person said: “I don’t always understand why I am in foster care and I would like to know a bit more about my family. I think life story work can help me.”

To help with this, we planned training for workers on life story based on your suggestions. Our children and young people created a short clip. This was shared as part of the training to show what they thought the most important parts of life story work were.

SNAP documents

We created the SNAP matching tool to help match young people with foster carers.

The Scoop newsletter

During the Coronavirus pandemic, we wanted to create a way to stay in touch, share information, and have some fun. We set up a group to create our newsletter, the Scoop, which continues to run with quarterly issues.

Developing the Promise

The Promise is a document which tells all children and young people in care about their rights. There are two different promises, one for ages 0-25, and one for ages 16+.

Social worker profiles

Social worker profiles will be completed by all social workers. These will then be shared with children and young people, so they can learn more about their social workers.

Use of language in care

We discussed the type of language used within Children’s Services, and came up with some alternatives, such as:

• Changing ‘contact’ to ‘family time’
• Changing the names of Social Work teams to ‘in care teams’ and ‘life beyond care’
• Changing the names of our NiCC groups from ‘In Care Council’ to ‘Shout Out’ and ‘Voice’

This is because children felt our language to be too formal and didn’t fully explain what our groups are about.

Bright spots survey

Every two years we run the Bright Spots survey. We help promote the survey across the service, and to all looked after children and care leavers. We can then find out what is working well for young people and what isn’t. We discuss the results with Children’s Services so we can help make improvements.

Social worker poster

We made a poster of the ‘ideal’ social worker, to share with our teams.

Top tips for social workers

We discussed our top tips for social workers and some members recorded audio clips, which we played in our Ways of Working training sessions.

Practice Week training

We prepared and presented a training session for social workers as part of Practice Week. We were able to share our experiences and offer advice.

Skills to foster training

Being part of our skills to foster training – we regularly attend this foster carer training to share our experiences.

Interview panels

We regularly interview Children’s Services staff and decide with the adult panel who we think would be best for the job.

Young Inspectors

We are taking part in the Young Inspectors project together with staff from commissioning. We inspect different residential homes and provide feedback to them and make recommendations. We have revisited and have been pleased to see positive changes from our suggestions.

Passport to independence project

We discussed how we can make the Passport to Independence more young person friendly. We created a survey to ask foster carers and young people what they thought could be changed about the passport. We put these recommendations forward to the sub-group who are reviewing the passport and making changes based on our feedback. We hope to review it soon.

Website

Creating, developing and reviewing this website!