What were Care Journeys Strategic Partnerships?

Name: The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations
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Care Journeys Strategic Partnerships (named Care Journeys or CJSPs) was one of Barnardo’s Core Priority Programmes as part of their 10-year strategy (2016—2025) focusing on outcomes for care-experienced young people.

CJSPs were established in Brent and Plymouth, beginning in 2019 and ending in 2024.

This webpage provides information on the evaluation of the Barnardo’s Care Journeys Strategic partnerships in Brent and Plymouth. Scroll below to see all reports and digests produced between 2019 and 2024.

Below you can find:

General information about the Care Journeys Strategic Partnerships
Information about the evaluation activity
Summaries of the final three learning digests published in September 2024
Links to published learning digests and evaluation reports.

Overview of Care Journeys

Plymouth and Brent CJSPs aimed to explore the major challenges in children’s social care and develop new solutions. They had the long-term goal of achieving transformational change within the system as it was not working well enough for young people. To do this, they worked with local authority staff and young people who had experience of the social care system. Together they developed ideas for better services that could be tested, trialled, and used to improve services for young people entering, living in, and leaving care. They also ran different activities that could be immediately helpful for young people at the same time as trying to influence the wider, national system of children’s social care in different ways.

The five outcomes that Care Journeys worked towards were agreed as follows:

The Strategic Partnerships are developed and delivered in collaboration/co-production with children, young people, parents, carers.
Partnerships with statutory authorities are robust (nurturing innovative partnerships).
Learning from the programme is shared and has influence (Learning).
Systems are improved in areas supported by Barnardo’s (Systems change).
Policy influence and advocacy.

The evaluation of Care Journeys

Our team at the Tavistock Institute were asked to help evaluate the progress, learning and achievements of Care Journeys in each area. To do this, we spoke to lots of people involved in Care Journeys, observed activities, and reviewed and analysed lots of data including surveys, activity reports and other outputs. This table details data gathering activities undertaken between 2019 and 2024.

Qualitative evaluation methods	Data gathered
Interviews with young people involved with Brent and Plymouth Care Journeys	45 interviews across Brent and Plymouth
Interviews with Brent and Plymouth Care Journeys staff and local authority staff as well as stakeholders	97 interviews across Brent and Plymouth
Interviews with Barnardo’s staff	13 interviews
Focus groups with Brent and Plymouth Care Journeys staff and local authority staff	4 focus groups
Observations of events, meetings and Care Journeys activities	45 observations across Brent and Plymouth
Review of Care Journeys documents (e.g., presentations, newsletters, research findings, strategic documents, letters written by care-experienced young people, meeting notes, learning log, email updates, Theory of Change, operational plans, risk logs) and wider literature review

Quantitative evaluation methods	Data gathered
Local authority care leaver data returns	Two returns from Plymouth and three returns from Brent
Coram Voice Bright Spots report of ‘Your Life Beyond Care Survey’	Two 'Bright Spots' survey reports from Brent and Plymouth
Surveys of young people involved with Brent and Plymouth Care Journeys	Pre- and post- questionnaires of participants of three different activities in Plymouth (n=15) Retrospective survey of young people involved (n=11)
Survey of Personal Advisors (PAs)	8 responses representing 15 young people in Brent
Wellbeing workshop facilitator ratings	9 ratings
Care Journeys participation data

Data gathering and analysis resulted in the production of several learning digests and reports, eight of which are available below (most recent first):

Summaries of the final three learning digests produced in September 2024

Read below for summaries sharing key headlines from each of the most recently produced learning digests by the evaluation team. Here are links where you can read the full reports.

Learning Digest 4

Outcomes for care-experienced young people in Brent and Plymouth Care Journeys

This digest shares information on the evaluation team’s approach to measuring outcomes for young people, before focusing on discussing the outcomes achieved by and for young people.

Outcomes reported included improvements to:

social connections, relationships and support networks.
mental and physical wellbeing, confidence, sense of identity and self-esteem.
skills, knowledge and understanding.
pursuit of personal goals (education, employment and training and other positive destinations).

Building social connections

Many young people who joined Care Journeys felt understood and made new friends. For some, it was the first time they met others who shared their experiences of the care system. These connections not only helped reduce loneliness but also provided a support network that helped young people feel more confident.

Fostering wellbeing and self-esteem

Getting involved in Care Journeys had an impact on how young people felt about themselves. Many noticed they had better self-esteem, and felt healthier, both mentally and physically. The activities and support helped participants feel more in control of their lives, more optimistic, and less anxious about the future.

Learning new skills and pursuing personal goals

Care Journeys helped young people learn important life skills - from practical things like cooking and teamwork to understanding how the care system works. Some young people used their experiences to help improve the system for others in the future, including through volunteering and paid work.

Learning Digest 5

Learning from Brent Care Journeys

This digest summarises previous reports, updating on Brent Care Journey’s (BCJ) progress since July 2022. It demonstrates how it continued to work well in partnership with care-experienced young people, with the local authority and other partners to improve young people’s experiences of the care system, in the here and now, and hopefully long into the future. It then discusses two areas of learning identified from Brent care journeys. These are the:

factors that seemed to lead to BCJs radical approach to collaboration.
challenges of legacy and continuity with long-term relational work.

Despite facing challenges along the way, Brent Care Journeys undertook some outstanding collaborative work with young people and professionals. Factors that seemed to make the Brent experience different to many initiatives which struggle to achieve true collaborative work include:

an ethos that cuts across traditional roles/ boundaries.
leading by example and offering experiential learning.
the skills, capacity and personal qualities of the team.
strategic support and resources.

The team at Brent Care Journeys seemed to work with everyone, young people and adults, professionals and non-professionals, as equal partners with expertise. They invested time and resource to embody the values they were promoting — sharing power and decision-making. This meant that whoever got involved in co-designing and testing activities, also got an experience of what this ethos and these values felt like in practice.

Key to being able to do this, was the specific knowledge and skills that the staff team held, their commitment and passion, as well as drawing on their own lived experience and creativity to benefit the work. This was supported by senior leaders within both Barnardo’s and Brent Council, and budget to produce some high quality outputs – examples include films, poetry and welcome packs for young people living in Semi-independent accommodation (SIA), which is now a requirement for all local SIA providers.

Challenges of legacy and sustainability include the inevitable losses involved when a highly skilled team is no longer available, alongside the ending of relationships that are impossible to continue beyond the funding period. Conversations and work took place from the early stages of Brent Care Journeys to support what could be sustained, with some excellent results transpiring – including working with Ofsted and training for professionals, and some meaningful work towards good endings with young people. However, the long-term direct support for young people is more difficult to sustain as is the influence on parts of the system that the project could not reach.

Overall, Brent Care Journeys was an exceptional project, offering much for others inside and outside of the children’s social care system to learn from. It raises questions as to how partnerships of this kind can be better supported to lead sustainable and meaningful change.

Learning Digest 6

Learning from Plymouth Care Journeys

This digest updates on Plymouth Care Journeys (PCJ) activities reported since July 2022 as well as highlighting key learning and recommendations from previous reports. It then discusses some further learning, building on previous learning digests.

For instance, Plymouth Care Journeys demonstrated how relatively little investment in projects for a small number of young people can influence decisions that might benefit many more people in the long term. One example is the ‘Friday Hub’ set up and run by PCJ. This was a drop-in for care-experienced young people, offering support and services from a variety of agencies including healthcare and employability. Plymouth City Council, at the time of writing, have decided to run a care leavers hub as part of its new provision in Plymouth, which is planned to be staffed by PAs, social workers and other agencies.

The ’walk a day in my shoes’ project was also seen as influential in supporting the local authority to treat care experience as if it was a protected characteristic in the eyes of the law (as age, disability, gender and race are). In addition, by bringing in financial investment and organisational commitment to Care Journeys, it was possible for Barnardo’s and the local authority to work together more as equal partners. This helped create an environment where Barnardo’s could support Plymouth to increase its attention on the needs of care leavers.

However, Care Journeys in Plymouth did face some challenges, including around the time it took for some decisions to be made which affected the programme’s momentum. Sometimes young people and frontline staff (in both organisations) did not seem to be as included in some decisions as they perhaps could have been. Finally, the ending of PCJ was a challenge. Despite some meaningful work taking place to help ensure a good enough ending for young people, this was hampered by the early ending of the work. It seemed to demonstrate some of the impacts of the wider context when working in partnership – COVID-19; the subsequent cost of living crisis; staff changes and vacancies; funding cuts to services; political instability and challenging Ofsted inspections.