Corporate Parenting

Our Vision for Corporate Parenting in Newcastle

 

Every Child Matters: Change for Children provides the framework for Newcastle's Corporate Parenting Strategy to build services around the needs of children and young people in order to maximise their opportunities and minimise risks to them. The vision of the strategy is simply stated: we want for our looked after children everything that a good parent wants for their child. It wants:

• to be safe
• to be healthy
• to do well at school
• to go on to higher education when it leaves school or to train for a good job; and
• to get settled in adult life.

We want our children to be healthy physically and emotionally, we want our looked after children to be safe and protected from harm and exploitation and to be supported each step of the way towards adult life, we want our looked after children to achieve their potential at school, and to make the most of learning development opportunities. We want our looked after children to participate in the decisions affecting their care and their lives, to be our partners, along with their parents and carers, in shaping how we manage and organise the services, resources, and planning that supports them and cares for them. We want our looked after children to contribute their talents and skills to service of the community in all sorts of settings and ways, as responsible and caring members of society. We want our looked after children to make the transition into adulthood with the possibilities of good jobs, of going on to higher education, in good housing and financially secure.

Newcastle City Council is the corporate parent and we are all partners in helping Newcastle City Council to be a good parent, whatever our professional backgrounds, whatever our role, whoever our employer.  As elected members, as carers, as workers, as parents, as children and young people, as volunteers, the Corporate Parenting Strategy invites us to work together in a common enterprise to put the parenting of our looked after children at the heart of everything we do. Often having had even their basic needs unmet before becoming looked after, these children and young people daily accomplish the most remarkable things. They are looking to us to accomplish remarkable things too as their corporate parent.