Sufficiency Strategy for Cared for Children 2026-2030

I am delighted to share with you our local Sufficiency Strategy 2026-2030.

The Local Authority is committed to ensuring that all children in Gateshead thrive and that those most vulnerable receive the support they need to flourish. We are ambitious for the children in our care and want the very best for them. We want to ensure that children's life chances are enhanced and that we reduce inequalities by ensuring that they have access to opportunities to help them succeed.

Meeting the needs of children in care and those who are care experienced is the responsibility of the whole council and its multi-agency partners. We remain committed to working with our partners across health, education, police and the voluntary and community sector to develop services which are ambitious for our children, and which are designed with young people based on their feedback.

This strategy lays out our approach to the way in which we will work to ensure that we have the right services and support in place locally for our children so that they achieve the very best outcomes when they are in our care and as they move into adulthood.

Our ambition is to be the very best corporate parent we can be to our children and for children who are in our care to live in loving, safe homes; close to their families and friends and to support them to remain within their schools and colleges. We are committed to children growing up with a strong sense of Belonging and we know that these are the pillars of stability which provide so many of our children with the building blocks that support them in their lives. As a result of this ambition our strategy has the following aims:

• support children to live locally and maintain connections with family, friends and schools
• improve placement stability and prevent placement breakdown
• support sibling groups to remain living together
• meet diverse needs
• reduce reliance on external providers
• ensure value for money

Where we can, we aim to provide the best support to enable children to remain living within their families and extended families. We are committed to seeking out and finding those in a child's network and working with them to support children.

We know the importance of sibling relationships to so many of our children and are committed to supporting these important connections through the provisions in this strategy.

We want children to experience loving relationships in care and are committed to ensuring a wide range of choice of options locally to meet the wide range of our children's needs. We are committed to ensuring that we have the right number, variety, and quality of foster care, residential care and supported accommodation provision to meet our children's needs.

Our young ambassadors and our children in care council are central to the way in which we will measure the success of this strategy and action plan as the success of our approach will be in the feedback from the children who need our support.

Helen Fergusson

Director of Children's Services and Lifelong Learning