Developing Services
Encouraging services to aspire to excellence and working with them to get there
Our quality development programme supports Foyer services to cultivate, monitor and validate their Advantaged Thinking culture and practice.
It isn’t just a one-off stamp of quality: it’s a commitment to continual reflection, innovation and improvement within your service. It’s an opportunity to review your service’s performance against a defined set of quality standards, measure and mark ongoing progress, and demonstrate that your service consistently strives to improve its impact when working with young people.
“Personally it made my transition in to leading young people’s services easier as it focused my mind and experience to achieve a clear direction of travel.”Kate Gillespie, Director of Housing and Property Services, YMCA Derbyshire
The process
The development programme begins with a kickstart year, designed to power your team up and prepare you for the journey ahead. This year has four key phases:
1. Reflection
Generate discussion, ideas, involvement and buy-in throughout your service, and identify, alongside young people and your staff team, ways to embed AT culture and practice.
2. Exploration
Explore the core standards and indicators in more detail. Meet others embarking on the journey through Exploration Workshops, and begin submitting quantitative and qualitative evidence to feed into your service’s AT profile.
3. Discovery
Through evidence gathering, 121 coaching and a Discover Workshop, complete your AT profile and create a quality development plan to build on your identified strengths and areas for development.
4. Going Deeper
We will visit your service to deeply understand your culture and practices through conversations with young people and staff. Your AT profile, quality development plan and visit report will be reviewed by an independent panel of experts to validate your service’s quality development outcomes.
What’s next?
The first year is just the beginning!
Once you’re equipped with the knowledge and tools from year one, we’ll embark on a programme of support to encourage you to keep growing your AT culture and approach, and improving outcomes for young people.
Through regular reviews of your development plan and evidence collection, you’ll be able to measure each year’s progress and identify where you’ll focus next. Your development and quality will be reviewed and validated by our panel on an ongoing basis.
Our national benchmarking will enable you to see the wider picture from our national network of Foyers and understand where your service sits within this.
“It has been a very useful tool to allow us to take time out and really reflect on the service – the good, the bad and the ugly.”Becky Parke, Housing and Support Manager, YMCA Cheshire
The benefits
The quality development programme followed up by the ongoing Foyer Federation membership relationship has both short term and long term benefits and will benefit your service operationally and strategically:
- Reflect on your service offer and plan improvements.
- Prove your quality and impact internally and externally.
- Build a better understanding and working practice in Advantaged Thinking.
- Analyse and benchmark your service against national standards.
- Engage your staff and young people in a quality development journey.
- Support your service to meet Ofsted regulations by taking a more comprehensive, tailored, holistic view of the quality of the service for young people.
96% of participants stated they are likely to continue with their quality development journey in following years. 92% stated that they would recommend the quality development programme to another service.
The finer details
Our quality development and accreditation programme is for youth supported accommodation projects (normally 10+ bedspaces) who are current members of the Foyer Federation or ready to become members. It costs £3000 per service (plus 50% discount off your membership fee for the year leading to become accredited.
The process will involve a variety of staff, young people and key stakeholders. It will be led by our expert team to help guide the staff’s reflection, development and to positively challenge deficit based processes and practices ensures the service progresses. You will usually be part of a cohort of other services who are also engaged in the programme and can become a peer support group throughout the process.
Unlike other quality marks or accreditation, it is an ongoing quality development relationship that continues as part of your membership offer.
Note: if the service stops engaging with the process and we have to repeat elements of the process then we reserve the right to charge an additional fee to cover this cost.
“It allowed us to challenge ourselves and not be afraid of saying what we needed to improve.”Andy Ward, Young People’s Services Manager, Your Housing Group
Get in touch
If you’d like more information about how our quality development and accreditation programme could work with your service, contact [email protected].
