About our business
We have been working with the UK’s most vulnerable children for over 140 years, delivering services at the front line and ensuring all children and young people have a voice that is heard by service providers, governments and policy makers.
Through our services we find innovative, proven and child-centred solutions in the most complex and challenging situations. We work with commissioners to reach, engage, support and achieve positive outcomes for service users.
Read about our services or use our map of services to find out what we’re doing in your area.
Contact us to find out more about commissioning our services.
Our approach
We don’t work to a template but deliver tailored solutions which meet the diverse range of local needs throughout the UK.
And we bring added value as a large, national and well-established charity – thanks to our depth of experience and developed infrastructure we are able to set up, run and resource services effectively and efficiently.
We put the service user at the centre of design, focusing on the support and value they need. We do this with a participation strategy which is about more than consultation; it’s the active involvement of children and young people in creating, planning, managing, evaluating and developing the services they use. This ensures our services deliver what is needed, effectively and efficiently.
Understanding your needs
We recognise the need for commissioners to ensure their funding results in tangible outcomes that represent value for money.
We can provide the essential and often statutorily required services you need, with improved effectiveness and reduced spend. Barnardo’s scale and range means that additional management and delivery resource can be called in quickly to meet demand.
We are clearly accountable, maintaining the highest standards in our work, with a rigorous audit and inspection procedure. We meet our performance objectives and provide you with desirable outcomes – proof?.
With UK wide experience and a renowned research facility, Barnardo's provides access to operational best practice that can be difficult, costly or time consuming to develop in-house. Have a look at our resources and publications.
"Barnardo’s range of activities is extremely broad, partly reflecting the charity’s all-encompassing vision and purpose, but also the diverse service delivery requirements of statutory authorities."
New Philanthropy Capital – Charity Assessment 2009
Value for money
We offer a menu of tried and tested methodologies that have been honed through working with over 190,000 vulnerable and disadvantaged children and young people every year and sharing best practice across the 800 distinct services that we deliver.
Our ability to respond quickly to emerging needs with innovative solutions is also well known:
"Barnardo's has led the way in piloting new services".
New Philanthropy Capital - Charity Assessment 2009
As a charity, we have the added value of voluntary income and a strong volunteer base, meaning that we can provide extra support to services where it is needed.
Our intervention and preventative solutions for young people help to deliver significant savings in the long term.
"Funders can be confident [in Barnardo’s] that their funds will be used wisely to provide much-needed services which directly lead to better outcomes for vulnerable children."
New Philanthropy Capital - Charity Assessment 2009