The chief executive of Barnardo's outlines a bold agenda to change the nation's largest children's charity.

Barnardo’s is going to get bigger, says Javed Khan. Much bigger. And not only that, it is going to change the way it does things.

Khan, who became the chief executive of the country’s largest children’s charity two and a half years ago, has plans for almost every area of his organisation, including technology, learning, fundraising and recruitment.

But his most ambitious target is to change the way his charity works with commissioners in the public sector. And the way those commissioners themselves work.

For several months, now, his charity has been rolling out the first stage of a ten year strategic plan, and Khan is now ready to talk about it publicly for the first time.

That plan is driven by a belief that the charity will have to serve many more beneficiaries over the next decade. At present, Barnardo’s works with 248,000 vulnerable young people and children, but Khan says he anticipates this rising 25 per cent to well over 300,000. To pay for this, he aims to grow the charity’s income – currently £296m – to over £400m.

“We’ve based those figures on an analysis which shows child poverty is increasing,” he says. “We’re going to need more resources to secure the income we need to meet that challenge. We’re going to double our voluntary income, which is quite a commitment.”

'We need to change commissioning'

While the focus on fundraising growth is perhaps the most eye-catching announcement, there is perhaps even more focus on how the charity can wring more from its main activity at the moment – delivering public sector contracts.

At the moment, two thirds of Barnardo’s money comes from government public service contracts – mostly local authority. In total, it runs 966 services, and wins 78 per cent of all contracts it goes for.

Such contracts are notoriously changeable, and the margin on them can be extremely low. Khan says Barnardo’s wants to change the system, which he does not believe is working.

At the moment, he says, a commissioner identifies a problem, drafts a contract, and asks people to bid for it. Most of those bidders lose, and waste the money they spent of the bid. And bidding for contracts is not a quick or easy process.

Many within the field also argue that the contracts are often poorly targeted and do little to help beneficiaries.

“We walk away from a lot of contracts because of quality,” Khan says. “We know the price we can do good work for, and we won’t do it for less.”

There is a race to the bottom, he says, but Barnardo’s is not running in it.

Barnardo’s wants to help local authorities to deliver better commissioning, by getting involved in the contract design process. Khan is betting that he can persuade councils up and down the country to let Barnardo’s in at the ground floor, and let the charity co-design their services.

Khan says “we need to strategically rethink the way we deliver services” and that he hopes to get his charity involved “right at the start, not at the end” of contract design.

“If we do that, we will improve efficiencies and improve outcomes,” he says. “We’re saying ‘there’s a better way; come and have that discussion.’ And a lot of people are already having that conversation with us.”

He hopes to help local authorities to take a longer-term view, to commission contracts over longer periods, and to focus more on outcomes and on intervening early in children’s lives to solve problems later on. He wants charities to help improve front-office services in the same way that private companies have helped them tackle the back office.

“There’s a reason we have a ten-year plan,” he says. “We want long-term interventions. And the tide is turning. More and more local authorities are pooling resources and are looking to commission for a longer period. And the more visionary directors of children’s services are already talking to us about strategic partnerships.”

Barnardo’s has been testing the theory with Newport council in Wales, where the director of children’s services is a Barnardo’s employee, as are half the staff. The council and the charity run a joint service together – the Integrated Family Support Service.

“The bits of work we’re helping them with are outperforming their neighbours,” Khan says. “Now we’re taking the model around the country.”

Other councils, he hopes, will adopt the same approach.

A Westfield for small charities

For smaller charities, Barnardo’s must be a worry. Like all national charities, the charity is sometimes viewed by local organisations as a predator – inclined to swoop in and hoover up contracts that ought to go to local specialists. And long-term contracts, pooled resources and strategic partnerships all sound like potential barriers because they will require scale of those bidding for the work. But Khan believes that his organisation can and should support local charities.

He stresses that none of the charity’s growth is expected to come through merger, but says his charity may well set up a function to share back office services with smaller organisations that do good work, in order to take the pressure off them. His vision bears similarities to that of RNIB, which has launched a “group structure” in which smaller charities become associated with the larger one, but keep their own leadership and identity. He likens it to the services a shopping mall provides to small independent shops.

“Perhaps we could offer a home to smaller charities,” he says. “We could be a Westfield for the small charity sector.”

We will double our fundraising income

Other than government contracts, the main sources of income for Barnardo’s are fundraising and charity shops, which in the period to March 2015 produced a contribution of around £42m, after costs.

Khan is aiming for £100m in short order. In order to get there, the charity has opened 89 new shops in the past year, at a time when everyone else is consolidating.

“We’re clear in our ambition to be the biggest shops chain in the country,” he says.

The charity has also hired Louise Parkes as fundraising director, who Khan describes as “the fundraiser of her generation”.

Khan promises a “total rethink” of fundraising strategy, but will not be drawn on detail. What little he does say is about “the great and the good in philanthropy” and new corporate partnerships – including one with Santander – suggesting that the charity will not be as focused on individual giving.

Structures must work for staff and service users

Barnardo’s is a social care organisation, Khan says, and it will deliver that care in whatever way is most appropriate. Increasingly, that means technology.

“We want to completely reinvent that part of our service,” Khan said. “The children we support now were born into a digital environment. To reach them, that’s where we need to be.”

Again, he is not to be drawn on specifics, saying only that this is an area in need of a rethink. Barnardo’s has recently hired its first chief digital officer, Jason Caplin, from the Department for International Trade, to do that rethinking.

“We may be using technology soon in ways we can’t even imagine yet,” Khan says. “I don’t know exactly what we need to look at. Is it the website? Is it the way we communicate?

“It’s about what our staff and volunteers need to do their jobs smartly. It’s about what commissioners are starting to think about. And it’s about data.”

He says the charity has the power to track interventions over time and see how effective they are. Technology is a tool to gather evidence and assure the charity of what works.

“Digital will allow us to track this information better than we ever have,” he says.

Khan is also driven to change the organisation most by the idea of understanding and transferring best practice.

“Learning could be really exciting,” he says. “At the moment each of our services are doing their own thing. We want to become a real learning organisation.”

Khan says that people in the charity can learn more from one another, from other organisations, and from outside the sector. His dream is that staff are able to spend more time on learning and improving, to ensure they are as effective as possible.

'We need to avoid unconscious bias'

Barnardo’s already employs 8,500 people, and it might be reasonable to expect that this will increase to over 10,000 if Khan hits his growth targets. However he is not so sure.

“If we grow our income by 25 per cent, it doesn’t follow our staffing complement will grow by the same amount,” he says. “It may be we will deliver services differently.”

One thing he does want to change is the type of person the charity recruits. He is keen to make sure that the charity is not part of an unconscious prejudice against the very people it helps.

“Our analysis shows us that the children we’re going to be supporting in the future live in big urban centres and have the most diversity,” he says. “We need to reflect the makeup of the children we’re going to serve.”

Diversity, he says, is a difficult issue, not least because of the paucity of data.

“People don’t have to tick the box which shows their ethnicity,” he says. “We don’t even know who we’ve currently got.”

Unconscious bias, he says, is a significant problem in recruitment, and he worries the charity is not obeying the principles it wants others to follow.

“Are we recruiting from poorer communities?” he says. “Once people are with us are we recruiting fairly? We need to be honest and reflective and try to address that.”

Diversity, he says, is “a conundrum” and once again he says he does not have the answers.

Khan also has plans to change Barnardo’s governance. To make the charity more responsive to young people, Khan says, it has plans to involve them more heavily. But he believes this should be a gradual process.

“We want a young people’s advisory board to work alongside our trustees,” he says. “Then we want young people to become fully-fledged trustees. That’s where we want to go to.”

This is not an instant process, he says. It needs training and preparation.

“We need to identify young people and offer them help,” he says. “We need to get them used to the responsibility of governance.”

For all that he has spent a long time talking about commissioning, fundraising and good practice, Khan says his ultimate focus remains not on process but on the children who benefit.

“We’re narrowing our focus,” he says. “And we’re recommitting to the original vision of the charity that we will stick with any child for as long as they need us.”