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Born into Care

Since 2019 Blackpool has been a partner in the national Born into Care study. Following the development of the national guidelines, in Blackpool we decided that we wanted to run a co-production process to vision our response and what the next steps should be.

The HeadStart programme facilitated two co-production groups, one for mothers and one for fathers between September 2021 and February 2022. The groups were made up of experts by lived experience and those with professional working experience of the system.

We identified 8 key principles that we believe should underpin any new offer to parents and unborn babies at risk of separation at birth. These key principles were presented to a steering group of key stakeholders from social care, health and third sector organisations and crucially our lived experience experts.

Take a look at the Co-Production Process and findings from our recent Co-Production groups which explored the national Born into Care Agenda and how that looks in Blackpool.

From the 8 principles we highlighted 12 priority areas for change and have set off with our first 3 work streams focusing on relationships and transitions between families and services, practice models and approaches and mapping what the system currently looks like from a parent perspective with an intended physical resource for parents and families.

Each work stream includes a mixture of mothers, fathers, senior leaders or decision makers, practitioners, specialist midwives, public health representatives and third sector organisations. They will run for 10 weeks and during this time we will explore what the qualitative and quantitative data is telling us about the issue, explore potential solutions including examples both locally and nationally of good practice, and finally deciding and refining a set of recommendations for change, to be presented to the Born into Care steering group and agree pilot projects embedding a test and learn approach to making improvements in the system.

What makes this work different in its approach is that parents are equal partners in all aspects of the work. People who experience this system on a daily basis and can hold a mirror up for us, so we understand the challenges that the system itself has on families being able to stay together. Having this co-productive approach enables people from different parts of the system to come together and collectively problem solve and also to gain a deeper understanding of the system itself.