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National Children’s Bureau: Sector Awareness and Provider Preparedness Programme March Conference (Birmingham)

*Birmingham conference registrations have now closed. Thank you to everyone who has signed up, you will receive an email confirmation shortly with further details. There are still spaces left for our Manchester conference*


Thursday 21st March 10am – 3pm

Birmingham Conference and Events Centre
Hill St
Birmingham
B5 4EW

Shaping the Future of Supported Accommodation: Driving excellence to achieve positive outcomes for young people in care.

The National Children’s Bureau (NCB) is excited to announce their free national conference series for supported accommodation providers and local authorities, to share the learning from the Sector Awareness and Provider Preparedness programme.

Taking place in London (Monday 18th March), Birmingham (Thursday 21st March), and Manchester (Wednesday 27th March), the Shaping the Future of Supported Accommodation Conference will feature keynote speeches from Ofsted and the National Children’s Bureau, with attendance from Department for Education officials, as well as afternoon workshops on a range of important topics exploring how to drive excellence in the supported accommodation sector.

The morning will allow providers and local authorities to learn about the arrangements for inspection directly from Matthew Brazier, Project Director for Supported Accommodation at Ofsted, following the upcoming publication of the supported accommodation inspection guidance. Caroline Coady, Deputy Director for Social Care at NCB, will also share learning from providers and local authorities about the regulation of supported accommodation over the last fourteen months of the programme, as well as highlights from NCB’s catalogue of resources and learning tools.

The afternoon will include a series of workshops looking to the future of how we can continue to drive improvements to practice in supported accommodation and ensure that young people in care receive the best possible support on their journey to adulthood.

The workshops on offer are:

The Future of Supported Lodgings (Home for Good): Sam Lomas (Advocacy Lead) & Natalie Mills (Advocacy Consultant) from Home for Good will be delivering a workshop for supported lodgings providers. Home for Good facilitate the Supported Lodgings National Network bringing together local authorities and organisations who provide supported lodgings schemes across England. The workshop will explore how supported lodgings providers are accommodated within Ofsted’s regulation guidance and inspection framework, the barriers supported lodgings providers face when recruiting hosts and the how supported lodgings providers can excel in accommodating unaccompanied asylum-seeking young people.

Starting the conversation: Trauma in unaccompanied asylum seeking children and young people (UK Trauma Council): Trauma in unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and young people, delivered by the UK Trauma Council: In this workshop the UK Trauma Council seek to increase confidence in providers of supported accommodation in recognising and responding to the trauma of the young people in their care. They will explore the evidence-base and the implications for staff working with young people, outlining ways of beginning to talk about mental health and trauma. In the workshop, they will introduce their free resources made in collaboration with experts by experience. Aims: to understand the presentations of trauma in children young people who are unaccompanied, to explore ways of having conversations about trauma as a non-mental health professional, to support staff’s confidence when working with trauma and mental health.

The Key Principles of Quality Assurance for Providers and Local Authorities (NCB): In this workshop NCB will explore quality assurance from both the perspective of local authorities and providers. The session will discuss the key principles underpinning quality assurance, including the importance of the voice of young people, sharing tools and resources that we created as well and highlighting examples of good practice gathered throughout the programme.

Validation, Invalidation and Self-Validation - safety and security for young people in supported accommodation: The ATTUNE project is a research project using arts-based approaches to understand how difficult childhood experiences can affect adolescents, what those experiences mean to the young person, how young people can get through things, and what we can do to help. Running from September 2021 until 2025, ATTUNE seeks to understand what protects young people from being badly affected by ACEs, to find better ways of recognising young people’s strengths and where they want help. This workshop will be a chance for individuals to hear from the ATTUNE Project and the findings from research with young people conducted over the past two years across England. There will be time within the workshop for individuals to reflect on what they think a public health trauma resource should include.

This will be a joint event for local authorities and providers from each region, however, to help us aim for a balance of local authority and provider representation, we kindly request that you select the correct registration option to indicate if you are attending as a provider or local authority.

Supported Accommodation Provider: Sign up here

Local Authority Commissioner : Sign up here

If you have any questions, please email us at sapp@ncb.org.uk