BCT & Solihull Children’s Services Case Study

Understanding the challenge  

Birmingham Children’s Trust began by carrying out a full diagnostic across Solihull’s children’s services. This involved reviewing performance data, analysing practice and working closely with leaders and frontline teams to understand where change was needed most. The aim was not to introduce a fixed model, but to build a tailored improvement approach shaped around Solihull’s services, workforce and local context.  

Just as importantly, time was invested in building strong relationships across the organisation. Improvement work relied on trust, collaboration and open dialogue with  teams at every level, creating the conditions for meaningful and sustainable change.  

Supporting teams and strengthening practice  

Birmingham Children’s Trust worked directly with teams through intensive practice  reviews and improvement sessions. Social workers, managers and practitioners took part in detailed discussions around casework, performance and service delivery. These sessions helped identify strengths, highlight areas for development and build greater confidence and consistency across practice.  

Alongside this work with frontline teams, the partnership supported the development of  key services aimed at improving outcomes for children and families. These included developing an edge-of-care service to help children remain safely with their families,  strengthening family group conferences to empower family-led planning, and providing additional support for foster carers and special guardianship carers. BCT also provided a team to support the embedding of the Trust’s Breaking the Cycle (Breathe Trust Connect) programme to support parents who have experienced repeat removals.

Time was also invested in building strong relationships across the organisation. Working closely with teams at every level helped create the trust and openness needed to support meaningful and sustainable change.  

Driving long-term improvement  

Together, Solihull and Birmingham Children’s Trust developed Ambitious for Children, a whole-system improvement framework enabling leaders to track progress and drive change across services.  

Over the course of the partnership, stronger decision-making and better support for families helped safely reduce the number of children in care by more than 100. Three years after being judged Inadequate, and following six Ofsted monitoring visits, Solihull Children’s Services was inspected again in November 2025. For the first time in its history, the service was rated Good.