Overview of Birmingham Children’s Trust

Birmingham Children’s Trust was established in 2018 and is making a positive difference for children, young people, and families within the city.

The Trust has made important improvements – listening to and learning from others, improving social work practice, and supporting staff to do their jobs well. More recent improvements have strengthened the Trust’s position, as recognised in Ofsted’s last inspection and recent focused visits in 2020 and 2021.

How long have you been using the Carter Brown service?

Carter Brown has been an approved provider since 2016 and currently contracted on a Framework for specialist parenting assessments.

Why did you choose Carter Brown?

Our specialist Parenting Assessment framework requires providers that have a good range of social care experts available, who can undertake the different types of social work assessments we need, and that can support court processes. Communication, accuracy, responsiveness, quality, and relationship-based practice are also important factors, as well as things like flexibility and being aware of our needs as an organisation.

Carter Brown is an approved and contracted provider on a framework. 

For those who do not know Carter Brown, could you share what it is like to work with Carter Brown?

It’s a very professional organisation, if I email them, they’ll get back to me fairly swiftly, within an hour or two. They do their best to ensure a timely, efficient service while identifying the best experts from their portfolio. If there are any issues, there’s always good communication. I deal with the same staff who know our organisation well – working closely with our social care teams, legal and commissioning, which always helps. We have developed a good working relationship with Carter Brown over the years, Carter Brown has been very receptive to any feedback we give, thus enabling us to quickly overcome any issues that have arisen.

Would you recommend Carter Brown services to others? If so, why?

Yes, I would recommend Carter Brown to others. Carter Brown is one of the largest organisations offering these services. It has a high number and good range of experts and most of the time can meet our timescales. They strive to match the right experts to the different assessments we need. Communication is good, they keep us informed of progress. They take our feedback seriously and try to resolve issues quickly.

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