Bluestones Complex Care has been shortlisted for two categories at the Children & Young People Now Awards 2026 – the Children in Care Award and the Workforce Development Award.
It is a double recognition that says something quite specific about how the organisation works: that the quality of care a young person receives and the quality of investment made in the people delivering it are not two separate stories. They are the same one.
The Children in Care Award nomination recognises the SEED model, the organisation’s therapeutic continuum for looked-after children; Safety and Stability, Empower and Enrich, Educate and Enhance, Develop and Discharge. It is the framework that shapes every placement, every care plan and every 2am decision across the organisation’s homes, for young people who arrive carrying some of the most complex needs in the system.
The Workforce Development Award nomination recognises the Career Pathway; an eight-level, fully funded framework taking colleagues from Support Worker through to Area Manager, underpinned by a CARE ethos that makes explicit what the provider owes its people, not just what it expects of them.
Neither achievement stands alone. The young person who moves from crisis to independence does so because a practitioner stayed, was trained, was trusted and chose to build a career here rather than simply fill a role. The 100% of young people now engaged in education, the homes rated Good or above by Ofsted and Care Inspectorate Wales within months of opening, the placement that saved a commissioning authority over £200,000 while giving a young person their life back – none of it happens without a workforce that has somewhere to go and a reason to stay.
That is what this shortlisting vindicates. Not one good idea, but a culture built patiently, over years, without shortcuts. One where investing in a fourteen-year-old and investing in the person supporting them are treated as the same job.
“To be shortlisted for both of these awards, in the same year, is a genuinely proud moment for everyone at Bluestones Complex Care,” said Trish Stratford, CEO at Bluestones Complex Care. “These nominations aren’t about a single project or a single team. They’re about a way of working that runs through every home, every classroom and every conversation we have with the young people in our care. Whatever happens in November, this recognition belongs to the 150-plus people who show up, every day, and choose to stay.”
The winners will be announced at the CYP Now Awards ceremony on Thursday 26 November 2026, at the Novotel London West in Hammersmith, an evening that brings together providers, local authorities and practitioners from across the children’s services sector to celebrate the work too often done quietly, out of sight, in the background of a young person’s life.
For the wider group, this shortlisting is a marker worth pausing on. Bluestones Complex Care operates in one of the most demanding corners of the sector, supporting young people whom the system has frequently struggled to hold. To be recognised nationally, in the same year, for both the model of care it delivers and the workforce it has built to deliver it, is a meaningful external validation of work that is genuinely hard to get right.
Whatever the outcome on the night, being shortlisted is itself the story: two judging panels, independently, looking at the same provider and concluding that something distinctive is happening here. For a team built on the quiet, unglamorous, day-after-day work of showing up for children who have rarely had anyone do that consistently before, that recognition matters.
Congratulations to whose work made both of these nominations possible.
