Children’s Commissioners’ Conference, keynote speech given by Chris Luck, Group CEO

This keynote speech was delivered on June 21st 2024 at the Children’s Commissioners’ Conference with the theme ‘Time for Change: A New Role for Commissioning’.

Dear Colleagues, it’s a great privilege to be at the National Children’s Commissioning and Training Conference and to be invited to speak to you today. I am conscious that I have an audience of passionate and deep subject matter experts, including my Homes2Inspire leaders, and that this is a Friday, and the longest day to boot too! My aim is to not make it feel too much longer!

The conference topic is ‘Time for Change: A New Role for Commissioning’ and Martin Quinn was meticulous in signposting what the committee wanted me to cover, and I will endeavour to do so. I was asked to give a ‘view from the bridge’ in relation to the future of children’s service in a changing and challenging world. Any such view is mine alone and of course informed by own personal history, perspective, understanding, engagement, interpretation, and professional judgement. Together this allows me to chart and set a course, accepting that these are stormy seas to navigate safely. As I wrote this, I realised that it would be hard to see where my words were of Chris Luck the CEO or Chris Luck the private citizen. The danger is the possible blurring of the lines between my official view and my personal motivation and intent. I don’t apologise for this, because if you don’t have a vision as a lodestar to steer towards, no number of facts will spontaneously resolve into a plan that motivates sufficiently to overcome challenges. We all need to have the courage of our convictions.

In addressing such an important topic and audience, I think it’s worth setting out some of my credentials to do so. I lead an organisation that is dedicated to creating and delivering systems-change solutions that address market failure and create greater value beyond the market. I have a Board that is 100% supportive and willing to accept the risk of doing difficult things, to experiment, to invest in models that are replicable, scalable, and transferable. As a charity, I also have the luxury of not having shareholders, so the only ‘dividend’ required is to create additional value within and beyond commissioning; there’s no maximising profit, there’s no off shoring, there’s no growth demand other than to address the need that exists. I can look at long-term outcomes and commitments that are holistic, rather than repeat business fixated.

This long-term perspective allows me to seek solutions that address the underlying cause rather than the symptoms. Our problem today is not that care homes are in short supply, expensive, and often in the wrong place. It is that fact that children have need of them. Society’s solution therefore is to design interventions that result in the irrelevance of them. If we only seek to apply a plaster, then more plasters are needed. The solution is upstream. Interventions that help mitigate or prevent family breakdown, whether due to poverty, poor health, violence, being NEET, minimal prospects, inactivity, or hopelessness, are needed. The non-siloed longitudinal approach takes a longer-term view, a holistic view, a view that seeks to eliminate the causes and therefore the need.

This is not the market’s view. A market to function needs customers, needs repeat revenues, preferably rising volumes, and better still increasing margins and profits throughout the course of a contract. The crisis in the growing need for your services is mana from heaven. We all know that margins are improved by bearing down on pay, qualifications, tenure, innovation, additionality. Profit can be further improved through financial engineering, such as debt binging, inter-company loans, cash extraction, asset divestment to alternative holding companies, underinvesting, designing in quality reduction and shortcuts. Where have we seen this before?

I’m not going to be critical of the for-profit market in that it does what it declares, maximises wealth for its owners. We need to look at ourselves in the mirror and ask has our own fixation on ‘creating a market’ been instrumental in what we have today? Something has not been right in commissioning for a long time. I judge this to be true from what I’ve see and all the myriad of reviews and reports that you are all familiar with, including the 2024 Spring Budget announcement of the DfE launching a Market Intervention Advisory Group on the profiteering of private companies delivering children’s social care services. But also, in recent times our Homes to Inspire service has been subject to Private Equity interest three times. Private Equity only comes knocking when they see real opportunity to create disproportionate returns for distribution or when they need to smother alternative models, such as the Shaw Trust’s Homes to Inspire. But we must not misunderstand the cost of provision.

Children’s care is expensive. I hear that enough from councillors for me to wince at the challenge you have to deliver the quality and quantity of provision needed. No amount of re-tinkering or redefinition will make it inexpensive. In trying to, the initial market dream of driving down costs created the rush to the short-term low-price point provision as master metric. This directly opened the door to an evisceration of quality, geographical dislocation, and then rampant price inflation as capacity, competency, confidence, and control was lost. The sector sleepwalked into a monopoly of choice, becoming dependent on the rentier economy to provide for statutory services. This cost-inversion was a market failure of our own making, unintended, but still the case. Even so, it will never be ‘cheap’ providing for some of the most traumatised and vulnerable in our society, if we mean to solve not plaster. The average Shaw Trust Homes2Inspire home is significantly cheaper than the price of the rentier market, but it’s still not cheap; stakeholders and society need to understand this –we need to differentiate the price from value, and value by definition is over time.

Before I continue, I want to also credential my personal motivation and passion for what we want to achieve through my own story. If you have seen my bio, you will know that I have had a privileged career to date and am in a privileged position in every measurable sense. But this was only possible because in 1965 there was a care home for me, there was a determined group of caring professionals and volunteers who were able to ensure that a bad start did not mean a bad future. The journey through that first home as an infant, then home assistance, to eventual adoption, made the difference. That difference allowed me to face the world on equal terms, the benefits of which have now cascaded generationally to my family. Being able to fully contribute to society, with agency, hope, and without limits, was the result of the system in the 1960s. So, what you do and will do matters; your conference takeaways and determination to find another way will set the opportunities for today’s children in care to perhaps one day address your successors with a message of hope, achievement, and of course thanks.

So, what is Shaw Trust and why is it a part of the solution and not the problem?

Shaw Trust was founded as a charity in 1982, in the village of Shaw in Wiltshire, to help disabled people into work. The founder was frustrated that there was no way for individuals with disabilities to get to Swindon to work. So, he set up a shuttle service to compensate for the lack of suitable rural public transport. Since then, we have evolved to provide education, training, and careers guidance for people seeking to enter into meaningful, fulfilling, and progressive employment. We now have over 3000 employees and 400 volunteers, and we retain our founding belief that employment is the core route to a better life. But we have let go of the minibus!

And what we know is that having access to and being successful in employment is critically dependent on our formative years. How and where we lived, who with, what experiences we endured, the opportunities we had, all shape our view of the world, access to it, and what kind of future we believe possible. Solving or mitigating these obstacles and barriers to employability underpins our Child to Career holistic, whole-person framework. Providing Children’s services was a natural and necessary evolution for Shaw Trust, and we are immensely proud of Homes2Inspire’s 45 children’s homes, of which 97% are Ofsted Good and Outstanding, and growing, and of our fostering agency, and our supported accommodation services.

Through strategic partnerships and innovation, with our ‘charitable heart and commercial brain’ ethos, we aim to create lasting social value in the communities we support, and in an ideal world put ourselves out of business. Innovation is critical and is often sought but mostly given up on, as the flipside of opportunity is risk, and taking risk is brutally beaten out. Shaw Trust is willing to derisk by risk sharing.

The reality of not doing so is that business as usual will not work, as need outpaces resources, for all the reasons this audience understands. Local authorities operate in a deeply political space, where consensus is difficult and at times fleeting, not exactly what’s needed for long-term holistic solutions and experimentation. And you will not be parachuted resources or receive some form of Quantitative Easing. The competition for resources across your LA’s obligations will only increase financial strain. Thanks to low investment and the ‘market approach’ poor recruitment and retention in the sector is preventing scalable growth of quality provision. A minority of providers in number, but significant in scale, are extracting excessive profit and offshoring it, and not investing in long term partnership. If now is not the time for bold correction and change, the theme of this conference, then when is?

There is a way forward. You heard yesterday from Claire Winter about the success of our flagship strategic partnership with Somerset Council and NHS, as captured by the ‘Homes and Horizons’ programme. Claire has provided you with the detail which I won’t repeat, however this is a demonstrator of alternative commissioning, alternative outcomes, alternative delivery, and alternative leadership. This co-authored blueprint is the very antithesis of a cookie-cutter approach, and far beyond an input-orientated contract.

Key to the innovations in Somerset has been the integrated management and shared workforce, the in-county homes, and our high needs fostering service. This includes an innovative education offer to de-risk educational failure for these children. The imagining and ambition to develop a therapeutic education provision for these children was essential. We had the school building, the funding and commitment from the partnership. The hardest part was navigating the governance and getting it through the Department for Education. We are nearly there – the department has now accepted that the outcome aimed for was worth adapting national policy to accommodate – that is no mean feat and took a lot of professional patience and courage, and a clarity of purpose that all stakeholders could eventually cohere around! This approach to do the right thing needed for the county could not possibly be ‘input’ contracted and KPI’d. It needed trust, confidence, shared values, big ideas, and a determination to bring it to life. It also needed the time horizon to act within, and the courage to commit for an extended period. What we now have is a blueprint forged out of a determination for self-sufficiency, quality of outcomes and opportunities, and a razor like attention to minimise cost and then reinvest the resulting ‘dividend’ into further value creation. Again, the antithesis of the majority of provision.

Let me expand a bit on education as an integrated part of care homes – it is not a nicety. Education is critical to the stability of care placements and future employability. We know from our own data that we have an increase in the number of 5–10-year-olds coming into residential care, so access to education that understands their trauma should not be an afterthought or bolt on – it is an essential element of their journey to individual agency. Also, unless we can improve our offer to foster carers by ensuring an education placement that works, the vicious circle will continue. This needs to be a priority.

From our own conversations, what has been have achieved in Somerset is now shaping the ambition, dynamic and drive in designing the commissioning required in Nottinghamshire, Derby, and Northamptonshire, and elsewhere. The innovation pathfinder and risk partnership of Shaw Trust and Somerset, Homes and Horizons, has shown that elevating commissioning from contracting to partnering is something that can translate anywhere. We accept that there is no one size fits all approach – each local area has different questions to answer, different resources it can commit. Commissioning should never be agnostic of geography, of socio-economic demography, of local need and history. So, commissioning should be about creating a shared understanding of the problem, its hinterland, and then describe the end point, and not start from inputs and KPIs to be priced, and risk and its flipside of opportunity, should be shared. Any snake-oil merchants promising quick answers should be avoided. Bespoke solutions require a better, open, and earlier conversation. Commissioning should enable dialogue, not stifle it. Innovation comes from solutions to the outcome required, not adherence to the input demanded.

Our work is bespoke to each local authority, where we aim to develop partnerships with local solutions. This approach with our commissioning partners has created momentum. Homes2Inspire is the 9th largest and only charity-owned provider in Ofsted’s top ten. Homes2Inspire is operating more homes than the five largest voluntary providers of children’s homes put together. So, what is it that enables us to do this?

Our homes are built around the child, with the child, for the child. We look to create a strategic pathway with on and off ramps for commissioner and child throughout the Child to Career journey that Shaw Trust is pursuing. These hooks allow for commissioners to easily test and adjust, add and subtract, depending on the need as it evolves over the course of the partnership, rather than a constant costly round of re-contracting and rebidding, with the risk of cost growth and fracturing of the whole-child goal across multiple suppliers. We aim to open new homes for the exclusive use of host local authorities, ensuring local sufficiency for local children. We develop homes with a variety of ownership and refurbishment models, as required and as appropriate. If needed, we will pursue funding and will consider taking on assets if that creates better value. We care for children with a wide range of high-risk needs, an area of provision where local authorities need us most, and that is an area where we believe better conversations now will allow us to describe a better pathway, jointly plan it and then deliver at pace.

What role can you as a commissioner play to support others to care for your hardest to reach children? In Somerset we care for the children who are hardest to help and provide for. Children that may have been placed far away from home, in unregulated placements, under a Deprivation of Liberty Order, or within secure settings with no offer of a safe home back in their community. All of us here understand the challenges in caring for these children; the risk is high, from a regulatory, operational, financial, and most importantly human perspective. My board is committed to doing the difficult things because it’s the right thing to do.

A true strategic partnership is the enabler. We are seeing bid opportunities advertised as ‘strategic partnerships’, which shows there’s resonance with the idea, but we have not bid for them because they are strategic in title only. We need to understand the premise and principles of true strategic partnering; it cannot be the same short-term, input driven, transactional holding to account version of commissioning, with a new sticker. It needs to jointly commit to investment across the system. It needs shared strategy, leadership, and commitment at the highest level. This means shared resource and critically, shared risk. This sharing of risk needs to be strategic, operational, and financial. We need to be able to talk about cost, openly and with integrity. Strategic partnership should cause your commercial, legal, and contract staff to scratch their heads as to how you contract it – Somerset has done the hard yards and can advise. Delivering quality services that will achieve the outcomes that our children need is not ‘cheap’ per se, we’ve already asserted this, but as a partner we aim to give back to create additionality. I believe that our partnership with Somerset is truly strategic, if for no other reason than the fact that I co-chair the strategic steering group, I’m not hauled in front of it, and so I share the risk and opportunities and goals with Claire.

But to deliver this at the coalface we need to attract the best and brightest to care for our most vulnerable, so we must care for and invest in our workforce. Therefore, we should actively look to kite mark standards and seek adherence in all places, pursue a Children’s Home Care Academy for staff to be initiated, and then continuously be updated and upskilled as they pursue a professional career pathway. We don’t want staff moving for the extra £1 or joining the new supermarket that’s just opened. We need to create a profession, an aspirational one, that recognises, rewards, and develops, and by so doing creates a deep well of experience and knowledge. This experience then needs to function within an accredited passport system; a carer, house manager, regional manager should not have to start from scratch because they’ve crossed a county line. That way you increase mobility, flexibility, cross-pollination. And they should be pluggable into the LA HR system to be able to exchange, deepen, and grow, as well as create opportunities for respite and new skilling. A professional invested in workforce is a motivated one. It may be a cost today, but it will pay dividends for the children in your care that will benefit the child and society and break the dead-hand of today’s workforce challenges. We can and are willing to partner, help, stand-up, and experiment in all these areas. But you need strategic partnerships to deliver such strategic benefits.

I’ve talked about the rentier economy and value extraction, and how we have inadvertently opened the door to it. We advocate for a cost-plus model, as we have in Somerset, where the costs and accounts are open across the partnership and a reasonable return is agreed to reflect the level of shared risk and enable reinvestment. There is no place for excessive profiteering. In Somerset we take this further through a proportion of the return being reinvested back into Somerset via a social impact fund, which they will spend, with us through our Foundation, on improving outcomes from in care through to career. Tell me why all commissioning shouldn’t expect this? The model is live and delivering, and it’s yours to pursue.

We are excited to be the disruptor of poor practice and poor outcomes. Shaw Trust wants to enable other likeminded organisations to achieve the same. We want to build resilience within local authorities and to add competency and skill to local charities, to be an incubator, supporting local solutions for delivery by example. We don’t need to do it all ourselves and we are here to share our learning and expertise to help others do the same. I welcome coalitions of the willing to create and offer scale.

We have been doing this for years in other areas of our work and it has seen great results. A good example of this would be in Kent, where we have worked with Kent County Council to transform the delivery of community based mental health support. Live Well Kent and now Live Well Medway has seen what a fragmented range of grant-funded and sometime disjointed local services can become to deliver very successful and cost-effective community provision.

Shaw Trust alongside another local provider, Porchlight, have worked with the Local Authority and NHS to create and manage a vibrant, co-ordinated and outcome focused network of local providers, now delivering double the amount of support without any significant increases in costs to the local authority.

This has also allowed us to capacity build and develop local providers, many of them charities, community organisations or SMEs, so they can grow and support the local community even more. This re-investment back into the local communities doubles the impact of the initial investment of the services.

We don’t want to stop there. There is more value yet to be realised through co-production, encouraging delivery across organisational boundaries, and along the trajectory of the individual. This ties back to our Child to Career framework. We ask you to be bold and broad in your thinking. Strategic partnerships are stumped if worked in isolation with one part of a local authority. For example, through partnerships which span across children and adult services, we can achieve greater system change and improve the outcomes for children moving into adulthood, avoiding the cliff edge which for many comes at 18. Through delivery of care services, complemented by employability and skills services, we can achieve and sustain success for our young people into adulthood, to ensure they have good work prospects – the route to a better life, and a better society for all.

Reflecting on the MacAlister review and ‘Stable Homes, Built on Love’ we share many of the ambitions. We are a touch sceptic of the Regional Care Cooperatives but are keeping an open mind and are closely watching how Pathfinders unfolds. We know from experience that each individual locality has its own unique questions which need answering, and the RCC approach risks diluting a provider’s ability to respond with an individual solution. From our work in Somerset, Gloucestershire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, and Derby City, we know a one size fits all approach does not work. Local, focused integration and solution-shaping is most effective. That said, while the individual solutions need to be at that local level, it is possible to achieve the application of principles at a regional and sub-regional level, achieving efficiency and impact at scale. Therefore, we believe the answer is that of two layers: (1) regional application of principles; (2) local co-production of solutions. We are actively engaged with LAs looking at such partnering.

We greatly support the Department for Education’s agenda on capital funding to increase children’s homes sufficiency. Shaw Trust and Homes2Inspire have collaborated with multiple local authorities in delivering successful bids, repurposing existing council properties, and refurbishing new purchases. Following the successful mobilisation of several homes via this route, the DfE have invited us to share expertise through their panel around the planning and mobilisation of children’s homes. This is a public benefit to share with you all. Why relearn it?

In a similar capacity for the DfE, we are advising on caring for children with complex needs. We are witnessing misuse of the application of Deprivation of Liberty Order (a subject I know has been discussed at conference). We have welcomed the work of the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory on this, and their publication of the principles of caring for children with complex needs, which we contributed to with our own experience of supporting children subject to these Orders.

We support these complex young people not just within our children’s homes but also within our integrated service for Gloucestershire, Trevone House. If you are not aware of it then it is worth your time exploring. In response to Gloucestershire’s needs, we co-evolved Trevone House to provide an innovative integrated care and support model, whereby we reimagined a former elderly persons home into a modern service registered by Ofsted to support 16- 17-year-olds, and providing supported accommodation up to 25 years of age where required. The provision also hosts a CQC registered wellbeing suite, and facility for emergency placements. The service received the highest possible judgement in its first Ofsted rating and is achieving excellent outcomes for Gloucestershire’s young people. This took courage and partnership from Gloucestershire. As an innovation it has needed to be tested and adjusted, but it is now a new tool in the goal of increasing life chances for those in care. Again, this is now a functioning model, and we are happy to share.

Finally, we absolutely support the move to regulated supported accommodation, but we are mindful that the sector remains without a scalable solution for the most vulnerable 16- 17-year-olds, who will no longer qualify for supported accommodation and whom many children’s home providers will not take. Thoughtful and proactive commissioning is required to tackle this, and it is all of our responsibility. Ofsted regulation needs to be updated if we are to open homes at pace to cover this consequence. We need to remove the barriers to planning, onerous manager registration, and update policy to enable and not deter solutions.

In conclusion, your task by its very nature is challenging. Setting the conditions that will enable a whole-person, holistic, vertically, and horizontally integrated, approach to care provision is essential, because it’s the right thing to do, for the child, and for society. Your role is to minimise if not eliminate the forward carried risk they bear from deprivation and disadvantage, and to break the generational baton being passed on. Such a solution needs Child to Career system thinking so as to avoid perpetuating the pathway of child to county line gang, to incarceration, to worklessness.

You know this. Your efforts are never more needed as the consequences of the recent years is leading to increasing numbers of children entering the system, with more complex needs, at a time when finances are already stretched to breaking, and there is little hope of game-changing windfalls from any government.

The windfall must come from re-imaging commissioning; being more demanding of partnering to create innovation and share risk, that builds and develops the future, not eviscerates, and plunders it – outrageous profiteering has no place. We must aim and aspire to create systems that help mitigate upstream, with the ultimate goal of not needing the system at all – lofty, maybe unrealistic, but without the vision of what good should look like then the market will lock in the failure, rather than solve it; that is where the money is. To do this we must build on the sense of professional pride and satisfaction as our people, from commercial to legal to operational to social staff, work together to see children grow into adults with purpose, pride, and individual agency, ready to take on their role in society, not on the fringes. We as Shaw Trust, will not take on contracts that don’t favour this approach, as they will ultimately fail under the weight of the internal inconsistencies. We have experimented and modelled solutions that break the cycle and we aim to drive this forward. We can’t and don’t want to do this alone. In this audience there are many providers who share our sense of mission. I encourage alliances of the like-minded to come together and by extension create muscle, capacity, and share innovation, so that together we can replicate and scale partnerships that create real value, more value, for commissioners. A future where reasonable profit is enough, and the remainder is reinvested in services this country and not exported.

The measure of a civil and decent society is how we treat our children, from conception to adulthood. They are, after all, our future, and our legacy, and we should be able to look our legacy in the face with pride. It is time for change.

I’m not sure that you want many more Me’s, but I for one am grateful for the opportunity I had, and that you all continue to believe in better. I look forward to continuing the voyage with you. This is my view from the bridge.

Thank you for listening.