Sports field with goal posts and houses in the distance

GM RCC: Delivery Plan 2025 - 2026

The GM RCC Delivery Plan for 2025-26 was created during the pathfinder period to ensure that at the point of launching there will be tangible activity in play that will begin to realise impact and benefit for Local Authorities and partners.

Each year, the RCC Delivery Workplan will be established in consultation with key stakeholders including DCS Group, Commissioners, Health and Youth Justice colleagues.

The RCC Board will approve the workplan, assuming authority for management of activities and associated spending limited.

The RCC team will be accountable for the successful execution of the various elements of the workplan. In some cases, this may involve the creation of a dedicated board to oversee delivery (for example, managing Skyline or coordinating the activities of staff and teams). This could be implemented through a matrix management structure, such as the Foster for GM Hub currently hosted by Rochdale Council, or by seconding RCC staff as needed.

Within the RCC Delivery Plan for 2025 – 26, the following activity is ‘live’:

As part of GM’s successful Regional Care Cooperative bid, there was a commitment to carry out regional data analysis and forecasting future needs of homes for children in care, in partnership with health and justice, and to develop and publish a regional sufficiency strategy setting out current provision and action to fill gaps.

The project will partner with Social Finance to create a new demand modelling platform for Placements North West (PNW) Census data, 903 Returns, and CANS needs data to ensure data are live, accurate, and clean. The platform will include data feeds covering demand/referrals, child needs, and placements.

The GM Sufficiency Observatory and CLASP will also be redeveloped to include near-live data feed into the demand platform. The online demand platform will be accessible to all GM local authorities to view sufficiency data, interrogate trends, and better forecast demand.

All local authorities will be trained and supported to effectively use the platform, both to feed in data and to understand reporting capabilities. Social Finance will provide hosting and user support for this platform until it is transitioned over for the RCC to host it after 1st April 2027. 

With this platform, Greater Manchester will be better equipped to anticipate children’s needs in advance, thus allowing the region to prepare to meet young people’s needs.

As part of GM’s successful Regional Care Cooperative bid there was a commitment to explore different methods of assessing need for children in care requiring a foster home, children’s home or supported accommodation to ensure they live in the most appropriate home possible.

This 6-month pilot aims to assess and improve placement stability, care planning, and outcomes for vulnerable children in care using the BERRI assessment tool. It will focus on up to 100 children in high-cost placements, those entering care, children with multiple placement disruptions, and children in residential care due to a lack of fostering options.

The BERRI tool is a psychometric tool designed to evaluate emotional and behavioural difficulties, relationships, and resilience in children. BERRI will provide a comprehensive understanding of the children’s needs, guiding interventions to enhance placement stability and outcomes.

Project Skyline is a capital investment project supported by GMCA to create a shared children’s residential care service across the 10 GM LAs and GM NHS.

Launching in 2025, it will create 10 new Children’s Homes designed to meet the needs of local children/young people. Through Skyline, the partnership will harness the power of collaboration to deliver an overall increase in supply, reduce placement risks, and attract a quality workforce. Skyline homes will include a gold-standard workforce plan to support staff and promote retention.

The GM Buying Better project will establish a platform where more advantageous commercial terms and arrangements can be developed, explored and agreed with Providers operating in the region. Leveraging the aggregated expenditure across GM creates an opportunity to secure value for money that is hard to achieve by individual LAs on their own.

Working in collaboration with Andrew Rome (Revolution Consulting) we are working with Providers to explore alternative commercial models through a consolidated GM-wide buying approach. 

Benefits of this project include:

  • Preferred local access to placements, increasing much needed local sufficiency (and the indirect cost efficiencies this can bring for the authority)
  • Share in upside profitability in exchange for earlier commitment of funding.
  • Potential to simplify to stepped prices/volume discount structures.
  • Commercial terms, once agreed, sit in the background. This allows appropriate decision making by professionals around the children and young people based on assessment of need, matching and closer operational cooperation between professionals on both sides.
  • Valuable market intelligence
  • Potential to repeat the process at later points in time as market conditions change.

There is a clear process for new activity to be scoped, reviewed and, if agreed by the RCC Board, added into the Delivery Plan. This page will be updated as and when that occurs.

In 2021 GMCA hosted a survey of foster carers, to get a better understanding of the housing circumstances that might affect carers ability to be able to care for more children and young people. Over 100 carers told us that they had a further spare room in their property that could be used for fostering but wasn't at that moment in time. We listened to this feedback and in response launched the Room Makers Scheme which provided funding / support for those suitable carers who wanted to spruce up their existing spare rooms and foster more children and young people.

Overall, 26 new bedrooms being renovated and made available to support children and young people across Greater Manchester in the first wave of Room Makers grants.

In 24/25 we expanded the scope of Room Makers to include larger home renovation and extension capital projects, and this will lead to the creation of over 40 new placements by the time of its completion. The project was mobilised and deployed in less than 6 months, which is a testament to how effective it can be in creating new capacity quickly.

 

There is an intention to further expand the project in 25/26 and pilot new impact areas, including:

  1. Building bedroom space to enable children and young people to live with kinship carers whose properties currently prevent that from being a possibility.

  2. Building bedroom space to enable kinship carers to register as a mainstream carer and foster an additional children and young people.

  3. Supporting mainstream LA foster carers by building an additional bedroom to enable them to foster an additional children and young people.

  4. Pilot a strategic partnership with one or more Independent Fostering Agency (IFA) to support the creation of new bedroom space with their foster carers, underpinned by a new commercial agreement that ensures capacity created exclusively benefits GM LAs and also delivers lowers placement costs.