Homes2Inspire, working with Shaw Education Trust, has won a groundbreaking key strategic contract to deliver support to young people in Somerset. The contract reflects who we are as a child to career charity and will be worth more than £60 million over the next ten years. It will provide children’s residential homes, foster homes and therapeutic education to some of the county’s most vulnerable young people. 

We will be opening two new homes in the coming months with more to follow. These homes will share the values, commitment and high levels of quality as our existing children’s homes in the Midlands. Similarly, we will be developing a foster care service based on the Mockingbird Family model we use with our fostering services in Yorkshire with Fostering to Inspire. Both of these services provide care in an innovative and family-centred approach.

Playing to our strengths, we also brought in our expert team from Shaw Education Trust to support our approach for the therapeutic education delivery of our winning bid. This coupling and layering of our services ensured Somerset Council was hugely confident in our abilities to provide improved services for young people.

In a news release, Somerset stated: “This innovative ten-year partnership marks a new way of working together to change the experiences of children and young people. It will give them opportunities to have brighter futures and to enable them to become independent adults and positive members of our community and help them to raise their ambitions. Young people were actively involved in selecting Homes2Inspire as our partner and will be engaged in helping to support the development of new children’s homes. Developing homes with the children and young people who live in them is fundamental to this new approach.”

Speaking about the new contract, Chris Luck said: “I’m delighted we have won this hugely important contract in Somerset. Well done to everyone involved in the bid, it was an absolutely mammoth effort by all and a unique and challenging test of our ability to pivot and show agility, adaptability, and innovation. My sincere thanks to everyone who came together as a truly integrated matrix bid team to deliver on our promise to design customised integrated solutions. We now need to implement this work with Somerset County Council to demonstrate the success of this new innovative partnership approach to developing integrated services for children and young people to enable us to further our mission. Everyone deserves to have a bright future and achieve their aspirations.”

As part of our growth plans, we will be taking our approach in Somerset forward as a solution for other local authorities.