Looking to commission innovative, cost-effective, integrated health and social care services?
We’ve been improving the physical and mental health of babies, children, young people, and families for over 150 years. Whether you’re working at neighbourhood, place-based, or regional level, our trauma-informed, anti-racist, and inclusive approach ensures services deliver real, lasting impact across diverse communities.
From prevention to specialist support, we tailor our offer to meet local priorities, helping you achieve better health outcomes and stronger communities.
Let’s collaborate to improve health outcomes for children, young people, and families.
Get in touch about working togetherWhy commission us?
Our services take a trauma informed, anti-racist and inclusive approach to address health inequalities. This is always based on the principles of personalised care and shared decision making, with the voice of children, young people and their families at the heart, ensuring all services are accessible and appropriate.
Barnardo's commissioned services and partners benefit from:
- Our expertise, knowledge, and proven track record of providing high quality, inclusive integrated health and social care services that deliver measurable impact through robust evaluation, continuous learning, and a commitment to equity.
- Our passion and commitment to support babies, children, young people and families to improve health outcomes.
- Our experience of delivering large-scale contracts and supply chain management.
- Locally tailored delivery, based on a tried and tested methodology.
- Partnership working with VCSE (Voluntary Community and Social Enterprise) and community grassroots organisations.
- Strong relationships within the health system.
- The added value of the Barnardo’s brand and wider support that helps engage families with us.
- Services that are co-designed with children, young people and families.
Our Health Inequalities Approach
We know that children and young people from different backgrounds and with different life experiences can have different physical and mental health outcomes. These are health inequalities - unfair, avoidable and systemic differences in health outcomes between different groups.
We’re committed to working towards health equity for babies, children, young people and families, so everyone has a fair and just opportunity to attain their highest level of health. We want to ensure our services reach children when and where they need us.
To achieve this, our services must be inclusive, accessible, targeted where necessary, and delivered by those who understand the needs of all children and young people from all backgrounds, including those who are Black, minoritised ethnic, LGBT+ and/or disabled.
Early help is vital to address health inequalities, both to prevent children and young people from reaching crisis, and to promote good health for their future lives. As an integrated health and social care charity, we work to deliver services that support prevention, encourage early intervention and promote children and young people’s health and wellbeing.
Commission with confidence: How we achieve NHS requirements
Barnardo's Quality Account
As an NHS healthcare provider, we publish an annual Quality Account. This legal requirement measures the quality of Barnardo's healthcare services by looking at patient safety, how effective patient treatments are, and patient feedback about care provided.
Barnardo’s Patient and Carer Race Equality Framework (PCREF)
Barnardo’s is committed to being a diverse charity and challenging bias and discrimination, putting equality and diversity at the heart of our organisation.
As an NHS mental health service provider, we have adopted and implemented the Patient and Carer Race Equality Framework (PCREF), committing to reducing racial inequalities within our mental health services.
Barnardo’s Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF)
As a provider of health services contracted under the NHS Standard Contract, we have established the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF), strengthening our commitment to learning from incidents, improving safety, and supporting an open and transparent culture where children, young people, their families and staff are heard and respected.
Providing support in acute and emergency care settings
Our Family Support Workers offer psycho-social support to families in various health settings, including Emergency Departments, outpatient settings, and within Primary Care Networks. Our model aims to reduce pressures on the health system while providing accessible, non-clinical support to families when they need it most.
We work with families who may not meet the threshold for traditional children’s services intervention, or who may need support to access community services. We focus on addressing the root causes of ill-health to ensure lasting change for families. In partnership with local providers, we help families to access the right support at the right time and reduce health inequalities.
Learn more about Family Support Workers in acute and emergency care settings
Family Hubs offer: providing universal and targeted preventative and early intervention support
We offer a range of universal and targeted preventative and early intervention support, such as parenting programmes, play services, infant feeding, and guidance on nutrition. We also provide specialist services including SEND (special educational needs and disabilities), support for perinatal mental health, infant-parent relationships, domestic abuse support, housing advice and intensive family support. You can read more about Family Hubs in our report, Building families, building futures: The case for family hubs in every community.
We’re aligned to the vision set out in the Family Hub Specification in August 2022 and well placed to work collaboratively with you to achieve these plans. This could be as a lead or supporting delivery partner. As a national charity, with extensive local delivery experience, we’re experienced in integrated working with social care, health, education, youth provision, and community-based services.
Find out more about our in-person and virtual Family Hub offer
Delivering integrated mental health and wellbeing interventions in healthcare, education and community settings
Across England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, Barnardo’s delivers a range of mental health and wellbeing services for children and young people, serving a culturally and socially diverse population.
Our services are effectively tailored and integrated into the wider local systems, so they wrap around, complement and enhance existing offers. We offer a range of support from getting advice to getting risk support alongside Child and Adolescent Mental Health (CAMHS) Crisis Intervention Teams or Emergency Departments. We work in collaboration with the NHS, educational settings, social care and the voluntary sector to adopt the i-Thrive Framework at a local level, creating coherent and resource-efficient communities of mental health and wellbeing support for children, young people and families. We offer children and young people a range of therapeutic interventions including CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), counselling, art and play therapy and solution focused interventions on either an individual basis or within a group setting.
Read about how we deliver integrated mental health and wellbeing interventions.
Providing mental health support in educational settings
Barnardo’s is commissioned to deliver a wide range of mental health services in educational settings, including delivery of Mental Health Support Teams (MHSTs) in several regions in England since the Trailblazer rollout in 2018/19.
We provide a whole school approach which focuses on children and young people, parents and carers and teaching staff. Our support helps to build resilience and ensure that prevention and early intervention help is available when the warning signs start to emerge.
Read about our mental health support provision in educational settings
What is i-THRIVE?
i-THRIVE is a national framework for transforming children and young people’s mental health services. It moves away from a ‘tiered’ model to a needs-based approach, enabling more flexible, responsive and personalised support. It is built around five key needs-based groupings:
- Thriving: promoting well-being and resilience for all children.
- Getting Advice: early support and information.
- Getting Help: goal focused, evidence-based interventions.
- Getting More Help: more extensive or specialist support.
- Getting Risk Support: managing ongoing risk when treatment is not effective.
How we deliver i-THRIVE
We embed the i-THRIVE principles across all levels of our mental health provision. This enables us to:
- Work in true partnership with children and young people as equal partners to co-design and deliver services.
- Ensure choice and shared decision-making, empowering young people in their care journey.
- Focus on outcomes, not just outputs, using data and feedback to improve care.
- Provide integrated, trauma-informed, inclusive and anti-racist care, especially for children with complex or intersecting needs.
We offer a range of services aligned to each i-THRIVE grouping, from universal prevention and early help in education, to targeted therapy and crisis support enabling a flexible, need-led responses across local systems.
Healthy Child Programmes for 0–19 year olds, extending up to 25 for young people with SEND
We work in partnership with both large providers and local community organisations to deliver flexible, innovative Healthy Child Programmes. We bring together a skilled, multi-disciplinary team and use collaborative approaches, including matrix management, to ensure effective delivery and strong governance. Our 0–19 offer (extending up to 25 for young people with SEND) supports health visitor and school nurse-led teams, tailored to local needs and aligned with your place-based and commissioning priorities.
Find out more about our Healthy Child Programme 0 – 19 +25 offer.
Social prescribing for children and young people
Social prescribing is a key part of the NHS Long Term Plan. It helps children, young people and families take more control of their health and wellbeing, leading to positive behaviour change and reducing pressure on health services.
In comparison to adults, social prescribing for children and young people is underdeveloped with fewer services available. However, early evidence suggests that social prescribing is an effective preventative and early intervention service for children and young people with mild or non-clinical mental health problems (National Academy for Social Prescribing, 2023). To find out more about the benefits of social prescribing for children and young people read our report, The Missing Link: social prescribing for children and young people.
As a delivery partner, we bring valuable experience from running one of the largest social prescribing schemes for children and young people in the UK. We offer specialist knowledge in mental health and wellbeing and can help you design and deliver personalised support that’s shaped around the needs of local children and young people.
Read more about our social prescribing offer.
[It] has been a huge help for me. My anxiety was awful, I wouldn’t leave the house or talk to people, my attendance was awful, I couldn’t bring myself to go in. It’s had such a positive impact on my life, I can do stuff now, my attendance picked up, I can go outside. [...] I never thought I’d come this far, from where I was to a college place.
Barnardo’s service user supported by the Cumbria LINK social prescribing service.
SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) and Keyworker schemes
Keyworker schemes for children and young people with autism or a learning disability
Since the first Keyworker pilot sites were announced in 2020, Barnardo’s has played a key role in their successful rollout to support children and young people with a learning disability, autism or both. We provide Keyworker Schemes across England, working in partnership with families, parent carer forums, NHS Trusts, Integrated Care Systems (ICS) and local authorities (LAs).
We can support ICSs to develop and host Keyworker schemes, sharing national experience gained from pilot and early adopter sites, as well as other models of support for children and young people with SEND.
As a voluntary sector partner, we connect communities, co-produce with families and young people, lead successful recruitment campaigns and provide expertise on child-centred models. We work within NHS and LA governance frameworks and provide an independent, constructive perspective to help improve systems.
Find out more about our Keyworker schemes.
Support for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND)
We have many years of experience providing support for children and young people with SEND. We offer a range of services, including advice and information through Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Information Advice and Support Services (SENDIASS) for young people aged 0 to 25 and their parents or carers in several regions. We also run Keyworker schemes (see above) and evidence-based programmes to help parents and carers of children with autism (Cygnet) and ADHD (Parent Factor).