No Questions For Failed Our Families Transformation Plan
The family focused Our Families transformation plan gets a rebrand
Bristol City Council’s Our Families Transformation Plan, is quietly being ditched one year on, without any questions by councillors.
An update was brought to Children and Young People Policy Committee last week, but after an education officer presented the changed plan under a new name, no questions were asked by councillors sitting on the committee.
The Our Families transformation programme was the responsibility of former Chief Executive of Bristol City Council Stephen Peacock, alongside Director of Children and Education Transformation Vanessa Wilson.
It was originally one of four transformation programmes that went to Cabinet on 06 June 2023 for approval and funding. The decision pathway report shows that the delivery cost associated to the Our Families Programme was £4.78m, with £3.04m earmarked and £1.74m ‘new and requested from the corporately held resource’.

An update on how the transformation was going was presented at People Scrutiny Commission as recently as 19 February 2024. Vanessa Wilson stated in her report that the Our Families Transformation programme, will ‘design effective services with, and for, children, young people and families; and efficiency of delivery will improve as a result through a whole system change.’

But since then, the Our Families transformation plan failed to hit many of its own success markers and even went millions of pounds over budget.


A year on from the Our Families transformation programme going to Overview Scrutiny Management Board (OSMB) it has been quietly ditched.
It has gone through a re-brand, with the name of the transformation programme now called Families First.




At Children and Young People Policy Committee last week, current Executive Director of the Children and Education Directorate, Hannah Woodhouse, gave an update on the programme. It’s the first time there has been an update on the transformation this side of the May 2024 election.
In her update, she said that the current overspend on the project was £16m, with two areas they had not been able to make promised savings on.
Woodhouse said: “We had a transformation programme in Children’s Services in particular which was called Our Families. And it’s been focused on the last couple of years, particularly on reducing the pressure particularly in the high end of children’s social care, particularly supply side measures. So more children’s homes, foster carer support in particular. Some work particularly around the workforce as well. which we have implemented all three of those. We’ve got as you know a number of new children’s homes coming on board and we’ve brought those through this committee before.
“We’ve also implemented the foster carer – the Mockingbird Model – which is about providing more support for foster carers as well.
“So that went well and continues to be a priority. However we are not, you’ll see in our finance reports, which come through this committee and elsewhere. We are not able to deliver the full amount of the savings that we committed to. Partly as a result of two things in particular.
“One was around Home To School Travel Savings, which were not made last year. Partly as a result of the delay of the implementation of post-16 travel. And I know that we are going to be talking about that as I’m sure in this committee as we go forward. It’s a current conversation that we’re having, continuing to have with parents.
“And then the other area that we didn’t implement this year was savings associated with children’s centres. We do expect to be able to bring those forward in future years – again dependent on the budget.
“But we took a diagnostic of the sort of the Our Families work and while we’re seeing that we did take some savings, we’ve continued to see a budget overspend at the same time against high cost residential placements. And again we’ve talked about that before. The current budget overspend is £16m. It is driving the pressure on the council. We are doing everything we can to bring that overspend down.
“And so we reviewed our transformation programme and the conclusion was that we need to spend more time on the preventative and early intervention work. So whilst the supply side stuff is fine and we also need to work upstream to make sure that children form the earliest stages and from the early stages of vulnerability are supported as far as possible to prevent crisis occurring families under pressure which then causes children to be vulnerable and sometimes taken into care and therefore our reliance on high cost placements if we don’t have sufficient foster carers.
“So it’s a need to focus on prevention and early intervention. So what you could see here is that we are reviewing our transformation programme. We’re going to call it Families First, which is not a massive shift from its original name. But it is going to focus particularly around the 10 -16 cohort and rising demand and complexity of need.
“And so it will have and you can see in the paper a number of strands around family help, which links to the government’s Stable Homes Built On Love strategy. which was published last year. Particularly around a multi-agency child protection system around the edge of care but including extra familiar harm, which Tara talked about today. How do we support permanence planning so that children who are in care have got, are able to A -minismise the number of placement moves which we’ve talked about, but also to bring them to – as far as possible – either home or to a stable placement. So that there’s a degree of permanence for them or we minimise movement.
“And what we want to do is to pilot our family hubs model. Particularly in one area of the city – probably in the south of the city so that we bring together all our partners who are operating children’s centres, schools, family hubs, health partners, police partners, volunteering community sector. To work together to serve communities at a family hub level but also on a sort of hyper-local basis and more locally in the communities. In that way preventing the need for statutory services.
“You will see when we bring our budget proposals forward as a full council, you will see reference to a children’s transformation programme which is focused on early intervention, prevention and has these strands within it.
“There will also be a focus around practice and culture, because obviously as we know, the more positive and confident particularly social workers feel that we are able to minimise pressure, vacancies, agency workers in social care the better in terms of supporting children at risk. And so we will be focusing there on practice and on recruitment and support for social workers as well as part of that programme.”
Home To School Transport post-16 cuts met a further setback at the end of last month. We were contacted by a member of the public to tell us that a Bristol City Council run meeting about the changes had to be abandoned, with further meetings planned throughout the day postponed. This was due to what’s been described to us as ‘deeply inappropriate’ content being played to parent carers in a ‘chaotic’ meeting.

Councillor Christine Townsend said: “We are focused very much on invest to save. There’s a recognition that there needs to be more resource focused on our young people and their families and in their communities. And that is something that will be coming forward in our budget.”
She asked councillors on the committee if they had any questions, but none of them did.

The committee resolved to note the current position and performance of the Our Families Programme. It also noted and supported the direction of the Families First programme and agreed to receive the full business case for approval in January 2025.
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