We Are Juno is looking to set up its third home on the Wirral in early 2025
Government minister Janet Daby meeting with representatives of Wirral Council including council leader Cllr Paul Stuart and childrens director Elizabeth Hartley, and Sophie Clarke from We Are Juno(Image: We Are Juno)
A Liverpool based non-profit is looking to re-frame the way children in care are looked after. It comes as the UK government is looking to “crack down on care providers making excessive profit, tackle unregistered and unsafe provision and ensure earlier intervention to keep families together and help children to thrive.”
We Are Juno is a non-profit company looking to set up a number of homes across the Liverpool City Region aiming to provide better care for those who have had to leave their home. Their first home in Oxton has been rated good by Ofsted and have three open by early 2025.
Sophie Clarke, the managing director for Juno, said the idea of trying to create a better way of running a children’s home started through her previous work engaging young people with books and literature. One child she worked with had had seven placements in three years moving from home to home.
She said: “It was very easy to see from my relatively inexperienced eyes that there were a lot of things not working in the system around the children. That stuck with me.
“I was seeing children having to move placement a lot. Really good people trying their best but not quite being able to meet the emotional needs of some of the young people, the behavioural support that’s required.
“What does home look like? I spent a lot of time in children’s homes locally. Lots of really good staff trying their best but in environments that were quite run down or organisations that didn’t have the resources to do the job.”
Junos new home in Wallasey(Image: We Are Juno)
Working alongside Elizabeth Hartley, who is now Wirral Council’s children’s director, and other local authority staff, Sophie said they started looking at what a better children’s home would be speaking to those who were in care about the key issues.
The issues ranged from staff members not sticking around in a sector that has a high turnover due to low pay, homes feeling institutionalised, and not being in communities where there were things to do. Sometimes children’s homes are set up in deprived areas because property is cheaper.
Sophie added: “Kids talked about love describing the difference when they were in a foster placement where there was just a level of emotional attachment that maybe felt different than when they were in a residential environment.
“We focus on risk a lot of the time and do they feel safe but that has to be balanced against do they feel loved? We need to think about how we look after children.
“We’ve got to do something nationally as well as regionally to re-frame what does it mean to care? What does it mean to care for children? That it’s a deeply valued profession people can stay in.
“We’ve got to crack that and that’s partly about pay but it’s also about perceptions of these roles. People don’t come into these jobs because they want to be millionaires. They do it because they are nine times out of ten great people who care about others but get knackered and burnt out.”
Getting Juno started was a challenge with the need for money to pay for new properties, renovating it, and building up a team to operate the new home with start up costs running up to £500,000. The company found some ways around this with its Wallasey home was bought and renovated by social landlord Regenda which will be paid back through loans.
Sophie Clarke from We Are Juno
Juno also started off with a commercial loan from Wirral Council helping it to be move forward. Sophie said: “That was really important for Juno. I think when we think about how do you enable more not-for-profit organisations to work in this space, Wirral investing in Juno at the start gave others confidence that it was going to work.”
This led to loans from the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority and grant funding from investors. In the beginning, she said: “They loved what we were doing, they were really excited about the impact it could have on children but it was a new organisation with no track record. There was a message of coming back when you’ve got the first home open and that is a common barrier.”
The idea of Juno is that when it makes money, this will be reinvested back into the home and the local community. It’s not the only non-profit but the idea is to make sure funding stays in the system supporting families as they develop and improve the care provided.
Juno now has two homes in Wirral in Wallasey and Oxton. Another home is in the process of being set up in New Brighton as well as another one in Runcorn. From there, it will look at how to deliver 10 homes across the region.
It hasn’t been smooth. When setting up its second home in Wallasey, the company faced significant opposition from some people in the area though this was later criticised.
She said: “A lot of times children are removed from the care of their families because Mum and Dad are struggling, it’s not about the young person,” adding: “There can be a lot of mystery and mythology around children in care and care homes.
“They’re our kids and our intention is that we’re good neighbours and we support the young people we care for to build a relationship with their community. Over time I think as people get to know us those perceptions change and change positively. The kids are brilliant.”
Junos new home in Wallasey(Image: We Are Juno)
Children’s social care is a big cost for local authorities with Wirral Council on average paying over £5,000 a week on average for childcare residential placements. While Sophie said their fees weren’t the cheapest, they were upfront about their finances so local authorities “can be confident the money that is being charged is a fair reflection of how it is being spent and that is being spent on the children and the staff.
“Obviously in the long run, we will be reinvesting into early help prevention of the communities we are part of so there’s a longer term benefit as well. It’s about a fair good value price rather than excessive profit margins.”
In November 2024, the UK Government announced what it said was the “biggest overhaul in a generation to children’s social care.” This includes requiring key providers to share their finances with the government, limits on provider profits, and a call for not-for-profits to come forward. Ofsted will be given new powers as well as new funding for preventative services.
She said they welcomed the government’s announcement including more financial transparency but questioned how it might be delivered. She said they recently discussed with Janet Daby MP, the Minister for Children and Families, about how it could be made easier for organisations like Juno to develop.
She added: “There’s a risk we oversimplify. I don’t think the answer is exclusive, non-profit provision everywhere. It’s important that commissioners responsible for placing children have got a choice.
“It’s about making sure we have got the right provision for children available. I think there’s a danger there will be some great small private companies in this area doing really well by young people.
“It’s not a case that non profit and profit is bad. There’s a distinction between making a small amount of profit that’s invested back into that organisation and those children to excessive 23% profit being made going off into private equity.”