At Innovate, we have always been committed to a process of ongoing improvement… never standing still in our quest to develop and deliver the best possible standards of care and support to children and families across the UK.

This ongoing cycle of improvement would not have been possible without our Quality Assurance (QA) Team, who work alongside Innovate Managers and Social Care Teams to conduct regular reviews on our work with children and families; making sure that we deliver the best possible service and that we are ultimately able to respond to the ‘ever-evolving world’ of children’s social work.

Not only this, our QA team have long been integral to the knowledge and understanding of the complex and often fragile world of social work, helping us to learn and develop new ways of working that allow us to keep growing our service and so moving forward, we wanted to develop a better way of integrating their expertise to provide increased learning opportunities across our Innovate and Social Work Teams, including also support from our fantastic Therapeutic Care division.

What we can expect to see…

From the start of April, our existing team of experienced social work professionals are now known as ‘Innovate Practice Consultants’. Their job will continue to focus on the evaluation of our service and ensure that important insights are communicated to maintain service excellence. However, in addition, we will also be developing the purpose of this role to ensure that we are also delivering this knowledge more formally… and more regularly; helping both our internal support and externally facing social work teams to keep up to date with important information and changes that can help us all to better understand trends and insights surrounding children’s social work.

Training and support can be requested by Managers and Heads of Department, whereby training and support will be provided, alongside training opportunities in both Quality Assurance and Therapeutic Care, with regular monthly webinars starting at the end of April and training and reference materials from the team published monthly from May.

Darren Shaw, Director of Service Delivery at Innovate said:

“We’re really excited by this important new development, and we look forward to developing this much needed service for our teams, ultimately making sure that we deliver the best possible outcomes for children and their families across the UK and giving confidence to the Local Authorities we work with that we are constantly pushing the boundaries to achieve excellence in social care and quality assurance.”