A welcoming home built on a sustainable model that enables reinvestment back into quality care and direct support for children and young people. Social adVentures is a multi-stakeholder cooperative specialising in public health, children’s residential care, fostering and social care contracts that run alongside social businesses including childcare nurseries, training, a community gym and forest schools. Established in 2011, it works across all age ranges, delivering a wide range of services. In 2022 Social adVentures led a partnership (The Fair Care Alliance) to commission a feasibility study into Children’s Residential Care in Greater Manchester. The study highlighted gaps in delivery, showed how the third sector can make an impact, and set out a plan of action, leading to Social adVentures opening its first residential children’s home (Oak View located in Salford), supported through a £405,000 investment from Social and Sustainable Capital’s Community Investment Fund. Impact and innovation Refurbished to an extremely high standard, Oak View has become a welcoming home to three young people, all of whom are from local communities having been placed by Salford City Council. This contrasts strongly with the historical 17% local placement rate across Greater Manchester, showing what’s possible when you design around relationships, identity and stability. Oak View’s recent, second Ofsted inspection sustained a rating of ‘Good’ in all areas. It’s built on a sustainable model that enables reinvestment back into quality care and direct support for children and young people, and this has been evidenced with holidays and trips abroad, a clinical partnership with another local third sector organisations and an innovative pilot around wider family support. Every year, over 2,000 children in Greater Manchester are brought into care, with 30% of placements breaking down within eight months. In 2021, the Competition and Markets Authority highlighted that prices and profits in this sector were excessively high, driven by large private providers burdened with substantial debt, putting both their stability and the welfare of children at risk. Social adVentures is also explicitly tackling placement breakdown by investing in workforce quality, including using immersive learning and supporting staff to Level 6 development via Kingston University’s Graduate Diploma in Residential Work (Children’s). This course is built around leadership and therapeutic practice, grounded in evidence-based approaches and social pedagogy. Moving into foster care – welcome HOME Identifying the desperate need for more foster carers in the UK, Social adVentures is now developing a trailblazing new fostering service, HOME (www.homefostering.org.uk). It’s specifically designed to help ‘would be’ foster carers find and move into a property that has sufficient bedroom space to enable them to look after children and young people, and in particular to help keep siblings together under one roof. Supported with start-up investment from The Postcode Innovation Trust (People’s Postcode Lottery) the service will open its doors in 2026. Social adVentures is leading the charge to bring more third sector organisations into the children’s social care market to ensure any surplus made from these services goes straight back into more high-quality interventions for vulnerable children. What next? • More case studies of social enterprise innovation
A welcoming home built on a sustainable model that enables reinvestment back into quality care and direct support for children and young people. Social adVentures is a multi-stakeholder cooperative specialising in public health, children’s residential care, fostering and social care contracts that run alongside social businesses including childcare nurseries, training, a community gym and forest schools. Established in 2011, it works across all age ranges, delivering a wide range of services. In 2022 Social adVentures led a partnership (The Fair Care Alliance) to commission a feasibility study into Children’s Residential Care in Greater Manchester. The study highlighted gaps in delivery, showed how the third sector can make an impact, and set out a plan of action, leading to Social adVentures opening its first residential children’s home (Oak View located in Salford), supported through a £405,000 investment from Social and Sustainable Capital’s Community Investment Fund. Impact and innovation Refurbished to an extremely high standard, Oak View has become a welcoming home to three young people, all of whom are from local communities having been placed by Salford City Council. This contrasts strongly with the historical 17% local placement rate across Greater Manchester, showing what’s possible when you design around relationships, identity and stability. Oak View’s recent, second Ofsted inspection sustained a rating of ‘Good’ in all areas. It’s built on a sustainable model that enables reinvestment back into quality care and direct support for children and young people, and this has been evidenced with holidays and trips abroad, a clinical partnership with another local third sector organisations and an innovative pilot around wider family support. Every year, over 2,000 children in Greater Manchester are brought into care, with 30% of placements breaking down within eight months. In 2021, the Competition and Markets Authority highlighted that prices and profits in this sector were excessively high, driven by large private providers burdened with substantial debt, putting both their stability and the welfare of children at risk. Social adVentures is also explicitly tackling placement breakdown by investing in workforce quality, including using immersive learning and supporting staff to Level 6 development via Kingston University’s Graduate Diploma in Residential Work (Children’s). This course is built around leadership and therapeutic practice, grounded in evidence-based approaches and social pedagogy. Moving into foster care – welcome HOME Identifying the desperate need for more foster carers in the UK, Social adVentures is now developing a trailblazing new fostering service, HOME (www.homefostering.org.uk). It’s specifically designed to help ‘would be’ foster carers find and move into a property that has sufficient bedroom space to enable them to look after children and young people, and in particular to help keep siblings together under one roof. Supported with start-up investment from The Postcode Innovation Trust (People’s Postcode Lottery) the service will open its doors in 2026. Social adVentures is leading the charge to bring more third sector organisations into the children’s social care market to ensure any surplus made from these services goes straight back into more high-quality interventions for vulnerable children. What next? • More case studies of social enterprise innovation