Across England, there are now more than 80,000 children and young people in local authority care and pressure on children's services continues to grow. In England today, a placement in residential care costs on average £318,400 per child per year. The human and financial case for getting support right, earlier, could not be clearer.
In the East Midlands, one service is demonstrating what becomes possible when evidence-based parenting support is placed at the heart of helping families.
The STARS - Supporting Children and Young People to Achieve Resilience and Success - service delivered by Polaris Children’s Services is built upon their Safer Stronger Families model, and was jointly commissioned by Derby City Council, Nottingham City Council and Nottinghamshire County Council. Funded through a Social Impact Bond, with support from the Department for Education's National Life Chances Fund, Outcomes for Children (Polaris Group) and Futures Limited, STARS was designed to support targeted cohorts of children and young people in local authority care and at the edge of care to achieve better outcomes.
Triple P - Positive Parenting Programme is at the heart of Polaris’s Safer Stronger Families model, alongside their Team Parenting approach and Solution Focused Brief Therapy. We know from decades of research that when parents and carers are given the right knowledge, skills and confidence, outcomes for children and young people can improve significantly. Triple P has been designed to both prevent and treat social, behavioural, emotional and developmental problems in children and young people by building parenting capacity in a structured, evidence-based way. In a service that is working with some of the most complex family situations, that foundation matters enormously.
STARS provides wraparound support for families to enable children and young people aged 6 to 18 years old to achieve stable placements, whether they live with their birth family or foster carers. The multi-disciplinary team consists of social workers, family support workers, education staff, a therapist, and peer mentors. Support is delivered over two years, moving through four phases: preparation, stabilisation, consolidation and sustaining, with the intensity reducing as families grow in confidence and capacity. Each family receives a dedicated keyworker, regular home visits, access to therapeutic support groups and progress meetings that bring together the child or young person's full professional network.
One of the hallmarks of STARS has been its willingness to evolve its model. Triple P was initially offered to parents of teens on a 1:1 basis only (Standard Teen Triple P), but as practitioners worked more closely with families, it became clear that a wider offer of Triple P programmes was needed. Both the one-to-one Standard 0-12 Triple P programme, then the Group variants of the 0-12 and Teen programmes are now also offered at different stages of the service model, ensuring that STARS meets the specific needs of each parent and carers reflective of the differing ages of their child(ren), and also the opportunity to revisit Triple P around specific parenting concerns over time. This is one of Triple P's core strengths: a suite of programmes flexible enough to meet families at different stages and with different needs, without compromising on the evidence base that underpins every variant.
In an external evaluation of STARS, many parents described Triple P as giving them practical tools they could use immediately, in the moments that mattered most.
The support has been game changing. Triple P and the
other courses have helped me to help my children
, said one parent.
The evaluation report also notes that almost all graduation reports described parents and carers improving their confidence and skills in managing the behaviour of their child or young person.This included parents using the strategies learnt through Triple P, particularly around setting boundaries and routines, and carers having a better understanding of therapeutic parenting approaches.
The STARS programme also shows what is achievable when evidence-based parenting support is embedded as a core component of wider support for fosters carers supporting children stepping down from residential care. In this part of the STARS model, Triple P sits alongside a therapeutic parenting course, Team Parenting and Solution Focused Brief Therapy as part of a joined-up response to some of the most complex family situations in the system. Each element does distinct work: Triple P builds the knowledge, skills and confidence of parents, while the therapeutic parenting course equips foster carers with a deeper understanding of therapeutic approaches. Together, they address both sides of the placement relationship.
That matters in the costly and often fragile process of stepping children down from residential care into foster placements. The ability to stabilise those placements and support successful step-downs represents significant value, human and financial, for any local authority commissioning these services.
By the end of September 2025, STARS had accepted 259 referrals over a five-year period. Of these, 124 families, children and young people completed the full two-year programme, the outcomes are tangible:
Placement stability data from Nottinghamshire County Council points to the impact of sustained engagement. Of families who graduated from STARS, 86% remained in a placement that had started prior to or during the intervention, compared to 42% of those whose support ended early.
Survey data tells a consistent story. A combined 88% of parents and carers felt that the support helped them cope with difficulties either all or most of the time. Among children and young people, that figure was 89%.
I'm more organised and have confidence in laying down the law in the house
, said one parent. For others, the shift ran even deeper.
To be honest, I don't know if my child would be coming home without the STARS support, so it has made a very big difference to where I am now
, shared another. A carer reflected: [Young person] wouldn't
still be here without the STARS team
.
Behind the data are real families whose lives have changed. Almost all described parents and carers improving their confidence and skills in managing their child's or foster child's behaviour, with Triple P strategies around setting boundaries and routines highlighted consistently. It is what practitioners working with Triple P see time and again, when parents feel more confident and equipped, children's behaviour and emotional wellbeing improve in turn. Improvements in young people's emotional regulation featured in almost every report, including reductions in angry outbursts and risky behaviour, and better engagement with school. To date, STARS has supported 57 children and young people to secure an Education, Health and Care Plan, giving them greater access to individualised support at school.
That sense of being genuinely supported, rather than judged, is something families return to again and again.
The service far exceeded my expectations. I have received excellent care and have not felt judged even once.
Thank you for coming into my and my son's life exactly when we needed you
,
one parent shared. A young person put it simply:
I like it, it's a really good thing to have. It's helped me a lot with certain things.
Professionals working alongside the programme have been equally positive. STARS have been a big source of help to the family I work with. There has been a lot of time and effort gone into the package offered, and
this has been carried out as agreed, with positive outcomes
, said one professional involved in the programme.
For too long, parenting support at the edge of care has been inconsistent, under-resourced and disconnected from the strongest available evidence. Foster Carers also report inconsistent training and support around children’s social, emotional and behavioural challenges. STARS points to a different approach: one where commissioners invest in proven programmes, delivered with fidelity and adapted to need, and where parents and carers are treated as capable of change when given the right support. The results in the East Midlands speak for themselves.
To learn more about how Triple P can support families at the edge of care, or in kinship or foster care, please get in touch.