The Coram Innovation Incubator’s (CII) Innovation Collective is a repository which aims to collate various projects and approaches that have been developed across the sector in a bid to tackle key challenges faced by children’s services.
In addition to sharing information about the projects emerging from the Coram Innovation Incubator, the categories straddle key priorities as identified by the annual CII survey including placement stability and sufficiency, child and adolescent mental health, adolescent and contextual safeguarding, child protection and the therapeutic offer for vulnerable children and young people.
The CII’s research has especially highlighted the many innovative approaches which have emerged over recent years to offer more targeted therapeutic support. This possibly reflects the increasing complexity of cases presenting to services. Furthermore, there has been a clear incentive to improve social care systems, exploiting the new potential of technology, with a number of examples in this arena. There is also an increasingly evident recognition that collaboration beyond the border of the local authority and with the third sector provides the breadth of insight, capacity and resource which is fundamental to successful innovation.
This list of innovations outlined here is certainly not exhaustive. The CII Innovation Collective indeed intends to act as a fluid document which can gather, explore and report interesting approaches that Coram and partners have seen under a number of categories:
- Preventive approaches
- System change
- Practice development
- Therapeutic support
Whilst the CII Innovation Collective will reflect any existing evaluations, appraisals and evidence that exist we expect that, by definition, many new approaches will not yet have reported definitive evidence or proof of concept data and this will clearly not preclude them featuring. Where available, links to the innovations have also been provided.