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Rachael Wardell’s year as president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) is a pivotal one for children’s social care in England.

In the next 12 months, the Department for Education (DfE) expects councils to “transform the whole system of help, support and protection, to ensure that every family can access the right help and support when they need it, with a strong emphasis on early intervention to prevent crisis”.

Under the DfE’s Families First Partnership programme, authorities and their partners are tasked with establishing family help services – to support families with multiple and complex needs to stay together where possible – and multi-agency child protection teams – to intervene decisively when children are at risk of significant harm.

These reforms are underpinned by the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which also heralds action to reshape placements for looked-after children, to boost sufficiency and quality, better support children with the most complex needs and curb excess profit-making by providers.

An eye-watering challenge for DCSs

It would be a daunting agenda at the best of times for directors of children’s services also facing severe challenges in relation to other areas, such as special educational needs and disability (SEND) services.

But against the backdrop of global economic turbulence, deepening child poverty and tight public finances, the challenge seems eye-watering.

However, Surrey council director Wardell, who succeeded Andy Smith on 1 April 2025, says she is excited to take the helm at ADCS.

Rachael Wardell (photo supplied by ADCS)

“It’s a really interesting time to be president. With a relatively new government with a big agenda, I think it’s a very exciting time to be working closely with the Department for Education and others.”

Her approach, she says, will be one of continuity with her predecessors, adding that it is important for the association not to be “chopping and changing in terms of what we’re seeking to do when we work with government”.

“What we’ve learned that if you work with central government, you can’t, in the life of one presidency, necessarily achieve change that you set out to achieve. It happens over years.”

Influence on agency social work policy

An example of this is policy on the use of agency social workers in children’s services.

Wardell’s predecessor but three, Charlotte Ramsden, spoke out on the issue in 2021, calling for national pay rates for locums to manage costs and enhance workforce stability.

Ramsden’s successor, Steve Crocker, went further the following year, in suggesting an outright ban on social work employment agencies to tackle the “profiteering” practices of some.

The DfE then proposed national rules to regulate councils’ use of agency staff, which were consulted upon under Crocker’s successor, John Pearce, and then started to be implemented under Wardell’s predecessor, Andy Smith. Both Pearce and Smith worked with, and sought to influence, the department on the rules’ content.

The rules’ implementation will conclude under Wardell, who has been involved in ADCS’s influencing effort throughout as chair of its workforce policy committee, until 2024, and then vice-president over the past year.

Fall in use of locums ‘influenced by rules’

The DfE’s latest children’s social work workforce data showed the first fall in agency numbers in seven years, in the year to September 2024. Though this was one month before the rules came into force, Wardell is clear that they were a factor in councils’ reduced use of locums.

“I’m pretty clear that it is a response to anticipating the changes coming in and lots of positive conversations between agency social workers and their local authorities about whether now is the right time for them to become permanent.”

With the rise in the number of permanently employed social workers exceeding the fall in the number of locum staff, Wardell says it is not a case of agency workers leaving the profession.

“Obviously, we have to wait and see if it continues to play out in that positive way,” she says. “But all of the anecdotes I hear, alongside the data that I see, says that we are having different kinds of conversations with our social workers about permanent employment, which is a positive thing.”

The current Labour government is going further than its Conservative predecessor on the agency rules by, firstly, putting them into law, and, secondly, applying them to council children’s social care staff generally.

Wardell welcomes this move, saying ADCS was concerned about bad practices, such as some agencies only supplying authorities with whole teams, not the individual locums they need, being applied to non-social work staff.

Recognising the value of non-social work staff

These staff – early help workers, family support practitioners – will play a critical part in the DfE’s social care reforms, as part of family help teams, holding cases as lead practitioners, including after they enter the statutory realm of a child being in need.

Wardell welcomes this acknowledgement of these practitioners’ skills and experience.

“A lot of times there was a failure to recognise the other qualifications that they had,” she says. “They are already tremendously skilled and experienced and we welcome that parity of esteem that the new framework provides for them.”

Concerns have been raised, including by Ofsted and the British Association of Social Workers, about the potential risks from not having social workers hold statutory cases.

However, Wardell says councils are already investing in the professional development of family support staff, and other non-social workers, and she expects this “to be strengthened under these arrangements”.

But what of the government’s wider agenda of rebalancing the social care system away from putting children on child protection plans or taking them into care towards supporting families to stay intact?

Councils have succeeded in boosting investment in family support since 2021 following several years of stagnation, but spending on it pales in comparison with expenditure on safeguarding and the care system.

Prospects for success for plan to ‘rebalance’ social care

Wardell says the prospects for rebalancing the system are “the best in a long time”. Most councils, she says, have practice models – such as family safeguarding – that are focused on supporting families to resolve their needs and stay together.

This is now being aided and abetted by policy, legislation and funding.

To help them engineer the shift, the DfE has provided authorities with a £270m children’s social care prevention grant in 2025-26, which they are expected to use in tandem with further just over £250m previously allocated to the now closed Supporting Families programme.

Wardell says this is “absolutely better than not having that funding there at all”, but is not sufficient on its own, being a small fraction of council spending on children’s social care (about £14bn).

“Some of our challenge is to bend the rest of our resources in the same direction – and to treat the funding like yeast, as a catalyst,” she adds.

Making this happen is no easy task, given the other pressures on children’s services.

Combating the high cost of placements

Not the least of these the high and rising cost of placements for children in care, as a result of an increasing care population, with more and more complex need, shortages of provision and alleged “profiteering” by providers.

The government is seeking to tackle this both through investment in children’s home capacity and foster care and reforms to the commissioning, regulation and provision of placements.

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill would enable ministers to direct councils to set up so-called “regional care co-operatives” in order to commission care collectively, giving them greater power to shape provision to meet children’s needs.

It would also introduce DfE financial oversight over the most significant providers, to guard against them unexpectedly failing and leaving a gap in provision. In addition, it would provide ministers with a backstop power to cap provider profits, should other measures not curb excess profit-making.

Wardell is positive about this package of reforms.

However, whatever the merits of legislative reform and increased funding, councils’ success in rebalancing the system are also dependent on the demands on them generated by social needs and pressures.

‘More child poverty and social disadvantage’

“We’ve seen upwards pressure driven by child poverty and some of the impact on our communities of social disadvantage and also some of the other changes in society around extra-familial harms, exploitation and radicalisation, all of which are challenging to respond to,” she says.

Beyond that, the government is now wrestling with the impact on the public finances of a less secure and more economically turbulent world. This heralds tight public finance settlements for services other than defence and the NHS in the forthcoming spending review, which will set expenditure limits from 2026-29.

Wardell’s message to ministers is to stay the course on children’s social care reform, based on an invest to save argument.

“We would say that we need a long-term financial settlement that provides us with security for children’s services and for local government more broadly, to go forward,” she says.

“I think that we would say that if you get things right for children, you are storing up positive financial impact for future years, because you have lower cost pressures when those young people reach adulthood.”

Staff shortages pose a risk to government plans to bolster the safeguarding of the growing number of children not in school, the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) president has warned.

Andy Smith told MPs this week that several councils had less than one full-time equivalent elective home education worker, meaning the workforce was “significantly insufficient” to take on new responsibilities in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.

The bill would require councils to create registers of children not in school, collect information on their education arrangements and support parents of home-schooled children with their education on request.

Parents would need to seek councils’ consent to home educate children subject to a child protection enquiry or plan, while councils would need to review the home and learning environments of home-schooled children subject to such safeguarding measures to determine whether they should be required to attend school.

Growing numbers of home educated children

The measures are designed to improve both the safeguarding and education of home educated children, the number of whom has risen from 116,300 during 2021-22 to 153,300 in 2023-24, according to Department for Education data.

In separate appearances before the education select committee and the committee of MPs scrutinising the bill, Smith said councils’ “hollowed out” elective home education (EHE) workforce would lack the capacity to take on these responsibilities without extra resource.

According to a 2021 ADCS survey of directors, councils’ average spend on EHE services in 2020-21 was £86,211, while they employed an average of 2.2 FTE staff for this purpose.

Lack of staff in local authorities

In his evidence to the public bill committee considering the legislation, Smith said that several councils – including his own authority, Derby – had less than one full-time equivalent staff member working on EHE.

“If you superimpose the changes envisaged by the bill, that provision would be significantly insufficient,” he said.

ADCS president for 2024-25, Andy Smith (picture supplied by ADCS)

“If we think about the practical things around visits, understanding the offer, trying to understand what is happening to children and building up that picture, there would need to be sufficient capacity to get sufficient workers in post across places to do that, and they would need be sufficiently trained.”

The point on training was picked up by Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel chair Annie Hudson, who gave evidence alongside Smith to the education select committee this week, as part of its current inquiry into children’s social care.

‘Need to skill up home education staff on safeguarding’

Hudson said visits to children’s homes to consider whether they should be required to attend school when subject to a child protection enquiry or plan would be carried out by EHE staff, who would “not necessarily have deep safeguarding knowledge and expertise”.

“They should have the foundation knowledge, but we will need to be clear so that those officers undertaking that work know what they might need to look at and look for and families know that
so that it is a transparent relationship when the local authorities execute that duty,” she added.

The government is yet to set out how much funding will be available to implement the legislation, but Local Government Association (LGA) assistant director of policy Ruth Stanier said it was vital all new burdens on councils were suitably resourced. She said the LGA and the DfE were holding talks about this already.

Multi-agency child protection teams

Stanier said the bill’s introduction of multi-agency child protection teams was another area that would require additional resource.

Under the plans, councils, chief officers of police and relevant NHS integrated care boards (ICB) would have to set up one or more multi-agency teams for the relevant local authority area. These would comprise at least one representative from each of the NHS and the police, along with at least two practitioners appointed by the local authority, a social worker and an educational professional.

Under the bill, the teams’ role would be to support the relevant local authority in the exercise of its child protection functions, though it is likely that they would in effect carry out those functions.

The idea, which is being tested in 10 areas under the families first for children pathfinder, was based on a recommendation from the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel in its 2022 report on the murders of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson.

Suggested benefits of joint safeguarding teams

Hudson told the education select committee that, while not a panacea for the challenges facing the child protection system, the introduction of the teams had three potential advantages:

1. Making it much easier for professionals from different agencies to share information about children, giving them a “much more real-time picture of what is going on in a child’s life, particularly when there are sudden changes”.
2. Pooling the expertise of different professional disciplines and enabling practitioners from different agencies to challenge, as well as support, one another.
3. Enabling joint decision making about the child, as opposed to the “siloed decision making” evident in the Arthur and Star cases.

Based on the model being tested in the pathfinder area, the multi-agency teams would include so-called lead child protection practitioners, whose role would be to lead child protection enquiries and hold cases.

Concerns over social worker burnout

While expressing broad support for the teams, Smith reiterated ADCS concerns about social workers holding only child protection cases and not working across a wider spectrum of children’s needs.

“We need to mitigate and minimise issues around burnout and make sure that social workers, through their professional development, have a rounded experience of social work across a broad
array of service users and service types,” he told the education select committee.

The teams are one of a number of measures designed to improve multi-agency safeguarding. These include the introduction of a single unique identifier (SUI) for each child, which professionals should use when sharing information, and a duty to share information for safeguarding and welfare purposes.

‘Risk of increasing volume of information’

Smith was cautious about the potential benefits of the changes, given the barriers to information sharing arising from agencies having separate and unconnected IT systems, distinct recording practices and different cultures.

He said the benefits of information sharing came when practitioners from different agencies came together to “understand what is happening for children…moving beyond single incidents”.

“There is a risk that increasing amounts of unanalysed information that might pass from A to B does not necessarily keep children safe,” he told the select committee.

Citing ADCS research that found councils received 3,001,339 safeguarding concerns in 2023-24, Smith warned: “Starting to add additional information that might come through the single unique identifier could increase that exponentially.”

The DfE plans to pilot the SUI prior to nationwide implementation.

The youngest children are at increased risk of harm due to growth in the numbers of parents with mental health and substance misuse issues, research has found.

Directors linked the trends in parental needs to poverty, inadequate housing and the legacy of pandemic, and said they were leaving infants at risk of neglect and physical injury.

The findings were reported in the latest phase of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services’ (ADCS) Safeguarding Pressures research series, through which it has analysed demand for, and provision of, children’s social care since 2010.

Phase 9 of the series covered 2022-24 and was based on data from 124 local authorities, extrapolated to cover all 153 councils, survey responses from 86 authorities and interviews with 34 directors of children’s services.

Growth in parental mental ill-health and substance misuse

Department for Education (DfE) data has revealed growth in the numbers of children in need assessments which identified parental mental health or substance misuse problems between 2022 and 2024. According to the DfE’s children in need census:

• Parental mental health concerns were identified 165,480 times in 2023-24, up from 158,330 in 2021-22, a rise of 4.5%. This made it the most common factor identified following an assessment, replacing domestic abuse where a parent is the victim, for which there were 160,600 cases in 2023-24, a similar number to 2021-22.
• Parental alcohol misuse concerns were identified 72,410 times in 2023-24, up 3% on 2021-22 (70,310).
• Parental drug misuse concerns were identified 70,940 times in 2023-24, up 5.8% on 2021-22 (67,010).

Three-quarters of respondents to the ADCS survey said issues arising from a deterioration in parental mental health had increased pressures on their services over the past two years, while two-thirds said the same about parental substance misuse.

Increased numbers of infants at risk

Directors said this was leading to increasing numbers of infants being at risk of, or experiencing, serious harm, particularly neglect or physical injury, and they linked the rising levels of parental need to family levels, poverty and inadequate housing.

Most directors reported increasing demand for children’s services from poor quality housing, homelessness and families experiencing poverty as a result of welfare reforms.

They also linked increasing parental mental health issues to the legacy of the pandemic, new parents lacking experiences of “good enough parenting” from their own childhoods and cuts to other services, such as health visiting provision.

In response to the findings, sector what works body Foundations said they underlined “the need to provide effective mental health support for parents”, including through parenting support. Its deputy chief executive, Donna Molloy, said it would shortly produce guidance for councils on “proven interventions” in relation to parenting support for families in contact with children’s social care.

Rising numbers of initial contacts but referral numbers fall

Councils reported a rise in initial contacts regarding safeguarding concerns, continuing a trend dating back to 2007-8, with the number received in 2023-24 (3,001,339) 8% up on the 2021-22 total. Two-thirds of the 2023-24 contacts came from the police, health or education.

However, the DfE’s census has shown a decrease in the number of referrals to children’s social care, which fell from 650,270 in 2021-22 to 621,880 in 2023-24, as well as in the number of children in need plans and child protection plans from 2022-24.

The ADCS found that councils accepted 22% of contacts in 2023-24 as a children’s social care referral (compared with 24% in 2021-22). Fourteen per cent were passed to early help (down from 16% in 2021-22), 30% signposted to other services or resulting in the provision of information and advice (33% in 2021-22) and 23% resulted in no further action, up from 16% in 2021-22.

“This suggests that much of this demand is being managed through an increased early help offer and by local authorities acting as a central point for offering information, advice and signposting to other services on behalf of the local partnership,” the ADCS said.

Increased use of early help

Despite the drop in the proportion of contacts referred to early help from 2022-24, the ADCS said the number of such referrals had grown by 93% from 2015-16 to 2023-24, from about 224,000 to 431,000.

Two-thirds of survey respondents said they had increased their provision of early help and targeted family support services from 2022-24. This included the establishment of family hubs, which provide a range of support services to families in a single place and for which half of local authority areas have received funding since 2022.

The ADCS said family hubs were “viewed very positively” by directors, with three-quarters of survey respondents saying they had set up such services, including some who had not received government funding.

The association added that councils had also relied heavily on funding from the Supporting Families programme, under which families with multiple needs are provided with multi-agency support, co-ordinated by a lead practitioner, and for which councils have been provided with £695m from 2022-25.

Last November, in a move strongly welcomed by ADCS, the government scrapped the payment by results element of the scheme, under which most councils received some money up front with the rest delivered based on the outcomes achieved for families.

Rollout of family help

Looking ahead, the government has allocated £250m in 2025-26 to roll out the family help model, under which councils provide multidisciplinary support to families in need by merging existing targeted early help and child in need services and bringing in staff with expertise in areas such as domestic abuse.

The model is being tested in the 10 families first for children pathfinder areas, though ADCS found that some other councils were adopting a similar approach.

In relation to looked-after children, the ADCS report charted the significant rise in the number of unaccompanied children, which grew by 30% from 2022-24, from 5,680 to 7,380, according to DfE figures.

The ADCS also highlighted the changing composition of the group, with the proportion of boys rising from 90% to 96%, and the proportion of those aged 16 or 17 increasing from 86% to 89%, from 2020-24.

Concerns over care of unaccompanied children and care leavers

Despite the government’s National Transfer Scheme – which aims to ensure unaccompanied children are more evenly spread throughout the country – the ADCS found numbers were far higher in the South East, where the vast majority of young people arrive, than in other regions.

Directors said that the “absence of national planning and support to enable an effective and sustainable asylum system was a source of real concern”. They also reported struggling to provide young people with the trauma-informed care and support they needed.

The ADCS also highlighted the number of care leavers who were former unaccompanied children, which grew by 25%, from 11,640 to 14,560, from 2022-24, and warned that councils were being under-funded to support them.

‘Shortfall in care leaver funding leaving young people at risk’

It cited a report last year by East Midlands Councils, which said that Home Office funding covered just 59% of the costs of supporting former unaccompanied care leavers, with the region’s annual shortfall in cash rising from £5.2m to £7.5m from 2020-24.

“Respondents to both the survey and interviews described how a lack of access to education, employment and appropriate therapeutic support leaves young people in limbo, exacerbating
mental health difficulties, risk of exploitation and involvement in unlawful activity, such as modern slavery,” the ADCS said.

A growing workforce but concerns over experience and agency use

The Safeguarding Pressures report also referenced the fact that the number of social workers in post in local authority children’s services reached a record high – 33,119 full-time equivalents – in September 2023, up by 4.7% on the year before.

The ADCS said that the increased numbers were largely newly qualified staff, “which can create pressures on more experienced colleagues”.

The report also noted that the number of agency staff in post also reached a record high (7,174 full-time equivalents) in September 2023, representing 17.8% of the workforce.

The association said that, while the 10 authorities with the lowest rates of agency use were all rated outstanding or good by Ofsted, seven of the 10 with the highest rates were rated inadequate with another two graded as requires improvement.

“[Directors] report that a negative judgement following inspection by Ofsted generates increased staff churn and reliance on agency social workers,” the report said.

Agency social work rules

In October 2024, the government began implementing rules on councils’ use of agency social work, which will be fully in force by October 2025. These include:

• A bar on staff with less than three years’ experience in a permanent role in local authority children’s services from taking up an agency post.
• A three-month ban on councils engaging social workers as locums within three months of them leaving a permanent role in the same region.
• Regionally agreed caps on maximum hourly pay rates for agency staff.
• Ensuring councils have direct management of staff supplied through agency project teams.

The ADCS is very supportive of the rules, but have called on the government to go further, by banning project teams outright for case-holding social work.

While the government has not committed to this, it has pledged to strengthen the agency rules by putting them into legislation and to extend them to non-social work roles in children’s services.

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Poverty and homelessness are driving demand for children’s social care, directors have warned.

Lack of adequate housing, welfare reforms and families lacking access to public funds are adding to pressures on children’s services, an Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) survey has found.

The findings come from the ADCS’s latest Safeguarding Pressures* research, its regular stocktake on the state of children’s social care in England, and were shared in a submission to the government’s child poverty taskforce.

The taskforce was set up last year to develop a cross-government strategy to alleviate child poverty, which is due this spring. It is examining how the government can increase household incomes, including through welfare reforms that raise employment levels and reduce poverty, help bring down the cost of essential goods and alleviate the negative impacts of poverty.

Rising levels of child poverty

As of 2022-23, 4.3m – or 30% of – children were in relative poverty in the UK, meaning they lived in a household whose income was below 60% of the average after taking account of housing costs. This is up from 27% of children in 2021-22 (source: Institute for Fiscal Studies).

In its submission, the ADCS cited past research that has identified a strong link between levels of deprivation in an area and children’s social care involvement (Bywaters et al), and said the Safeguarding Pressures survey had found increasing demand driven by poverty.

Poverty driving demand for children’s social care

Based on responses from 86 of the 153 authorities, the survey, carried out last year, found:

• Almost three-quarters had seen demand from families in poverty rise as a result of welfare reforms, particularly among larger families with three or more children. This is likely related to the introduction in 2017 of a two-child cap on household claims for child tax credit or universal credit.
• Nearly two-thirds said that poverty-driven demand has grown from families where one or more parents were in work.
• 59% said that increased demand on services was being driven by poor quality housing, while 61% reported increased safeguarding activity linked with homelessness and 54% said that demand on children’s social care was being driven by housing need amongst homeless young people.
• Almost half said service demand had risen in relation to families with no recourse to public funds (NRPF), who are unable to access benefits or help with housing due to their immigration status.

‘Incalculable’ impact of poverty on childhood

“The impact of poverty on childhood is incalculable, children arrive at school hungry and are unable to focus on learning, families are queuing up at food banks and schools are routinely buying coats, shoes and even washing clothes for pupils and their families,” the ADCS said.

“ADCS members believe that failure to address child poverty risks undermining the success of a range of planned reforms right across government.”

*The full results of the latest wave of the Safeguarding Pressures series will be published shortly.

Agency social workers numbers are coming down in children’s services in England following significant increases in their use by councils in recent years, a sector leader has said.

Association of Directors of Children’s Services president Andy Smith told Community Care he believed the trend was the result of the planned introduction of rules later this year to curb councils’ use of locums.

Rules on locum social work

The rules are part of the previous government’s Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy to reform children’s social care and are designed to cut the costs of agency work while improving continuity of support for children and families.

They include a ban on anyone without three years’ experience in a permanent role in children’s services from taking up a locum role, a requirement for councils to agree regional price caps on what they pay agencies and a restriction on the use of agency project teams.

Agency social worker numbers have escalated in recent years on the back of councils’ increasing struggles to recruit and retain social workers in children’s services.

As of September 2023, locums represented 17.8% of the children’s social work workforce in English councils, up from 15.5% in 2021.

‘Numbers of agency workers falling’

However, Smith said there was evidence that this trend was reversing.

“There’s certainly data showing that the numbers of agency social workers are going in the right direction, are reducing,” said Smith, who is strategic director of people services at Derby council.

“Certainly, in my local area, in the East Midlands, we’re seeing that across all 10 local authorities. So our hypothesis is that the impact of the reforms that are clearly going to come into effect as we move into the autumn are starting to potentially have an effect in the right direction.”

Under plans set by the previous government, statutory guidance requiring councils to follow most of the rules would come into force this summer, with requirements relating to the price caps and data collection being implemented in the autumn.

While the new Labour government has not yet commented on publicly on the plans, Smith said he expected the statutory guidance to come into force in September, in a speech to last week’s ADCS conference.

Disappointment over project team reversal

The ADCS has campaigned strongly for curbs on the agency social work market since 2021 and Smith said the DfE’s proposals were “writ large” with the association’s ideas.

However, he added that it remained disappointed by the previous government’s decision to reverse its initial plan to completely ban the use of project teams.

These involve councils hiring agency workers en masse, often with their own management and restrictions on caseloads.

ADCS has long warned that agencies have increasingly restricted the supply of locums to project teams, preventing councils from engaging individual workers to fill gaps and charging them more per practitioner.

The number of social workers hired through teams rose fivefold from January to June 2021 to the same period in 2022, according to ADCS research.

‘Opportunity’ with new government to reinstate ban

However, the department dropped the idea of a complete ban, after some respondents to the initial consultation on the rules said there using them was appropriate where caseloads, staff absences or vacancies were high, or to support struggling authorities.

Smith said ADCS was disappointed by this “U-turn”, but added that having a new government presented the opportunity to reinstate the planned ban.

“In the first conversation I have with the minister who will have the children’s social care brief that is on the list to talk to her about,” he said.

“They could do that tomorrow. That could be done really easily and it would send out, I think, a really strong message to the sector that government is listening and it sees the value of relationships and relational social work. Social work is not a project.”

Children’s social care reform plans

In his speech to the ADCS conference, Smith also stressed the urgency of implementing the sector reforms proposed by the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care and taken forward in Stable Homes, Built on Love.

Besides the agency social work rules, these are designed to ensure that many more children are supported to stay with their families or, where this not possible, with kinship carers; that those at risk are much better protected than is currently the case, and that children who go into care receive a much better experience and, as a result, better life chances than now.

The care review projected that the reforms would cost £2.6bn over four years but would save money in the long-term by reducing the projected care population by 30,000 – roughly 30% – within 10 years.

So far, the DfE has committed £200m to testing the proposed changes, for example, through the 10 “pathfinder” areas trialling the deployment of family help teams, merging child in need and targeted early help services, and specialist child protection practitioners.

Reform cost now ‘more than £2.6bn proposed by care review’

“We simply can’t afford to derail the plans or indeed take our foot of the gas; both in terms of children’s outcomes and the finances that we are diligently trying to balance day in, day out,” said Smith in his speech.

“The longer we leave it, the more it will cost; we need to reset the system now.”

Smith told Community Care that what was required now was more than £2.6bn because of increases in service costs since the care review’s final report in May 2022.

He said he had raised the issue with new education secretary Bridget Phillipson in an initial call with her last week.

Smith also called on the government to widen the focus of children’s social care reform beyond councils to their key partners.

“We can’t realise the ambition around any reforms, and really improve outcomes for children, if it’s just seen as a local authority endeavour, he said. “It has to engage health, it has to engage the police, both strategically and on the ground, and that was really missing in the run-up to the general election.”

‘Really difficult choices’ needed on funding services

During the election, Labour made no funding commitments in relation to children’s social care, despite the Local Government Association saying councils would need an extra £5bn in 2026-27 compared with 2023-24 to maintain provision at existing levels.

At the same time, the incoming government has pledged not to raise income tax rates, national insurance, VAT or corporation tax and set itself tight fiscal rules limiting how much it can borrow to fund public spending.

Funding for councils from 2025 onwards is due to be set out in a spending review this autumn and Smith stressed that “really difficult choices” would have to be made, though this could include using existing resource in a different way.

Call to pool budgets for children with mental health

For example, he suggested pooling NHS and local authority resources to support children with significant mental health needs in an arrangement similar to the better care fund (BCF) in adults’ services.

The BCF pools local authority and NHS funding locally to help people live independently at home for longer and enable them to receive care in the most appropriate place, for example, by tackling delayed discharges from hospital. It has enabled what would previously have been NHS resource to be spent on adult social care services.

Councils have struggled significantly with finding appropriate placements for children in care with severe mental health needs. This has led to them to seeking high numbers of so-called deprivation of liberty (DoL) orders from the High Court to authorise very restrictive care arrangements, often in unregistered settings.

At the same time, some council heads have criticised the NHS for reducing support for these young people through child and adolescent mental health services.

Smith said a BCF-style arrangement could help lever investment into preventive services to avoid councils having to source expensive and restrictive placements through DoL orders.

The turnover of directors of children’s services (DCSs) rose for the third consecutive year in 2023-24, on the back of high numbers of interim appointments and leaders moving between councils.

In total, 62 DCS appointments were made across the 153 local authorities over the past year, up from 50 in 2022-23 and a recent low of 39 in 2020-21, revealed the Association of Directors of Children’s Services’  (ADCS) annual update on the role.

This is the second highest figure since ADCS started recording the data in 2007-8.

While the number of appointments of new DCSs (21) was in line with the average per year, the number of interim appointments, 28, was significantly above the previous annual norm (19). The same was true of the number of directors moving between authorities, of which there were 11, above the previous average of seven.

High number of interim DCS appointments

The changes of role happened across 49 authorities, with 13 experiencing two DCS changes during the year, largely because of interim appointments. On a regional basis, turnover was greatest in the South West, where there were 12 changes across eight (53%) of the 15 local authorities.

Half of interim appointees (14) were assistant directors from the authority in question, while nine were former DCSs.

As of the end of the year, 17 DCSs were in interim posts, nine of whom had been in post for six months or less. Overall, the average tenure of current DCSs in their current role was 33 months as of March 2024 – 35 months for permanent appointees and eight months for interims.

Drivers of DCS turnover studied

The news follows a report by leadership training body the Staff College last year examining the reasons behind the relatively high turnover of DCSs, among whom the average tenure is about three years.

This identified four key “frustrations” in the role: council-based bureaucratic, political, financial and workload pressures; disappointment with government children’s services policy; concerns about the status of children’s services among local partnerships, and the impact of inspection and regulation.

Among its recommendations, the report called on government to improve the priority it gave to children, Ofsted to take a more “constructive” approach to inspection and councils to promote positive and supportive cultures in which DCSs were more highly valued.

It called on councils to widen the pool of potential DCSs, including by looking beyond managers with a social work background and tackling the lack of diversity in the role, particularly in relation to race.

Lack of racial diversity in role

Though ADCS’s latest stocktake found that the proportion of white DCSs had fallen from 93% to 90% from 2022-23, this is still well above the average for the social work workforce in children’s services (75%).

Black leaders are particularly underrepresented relative to the workforce, accounting for 2% of directors, the same as in 2022, compared with 14% of the children’s social work workforce.

The report also showed an ongoing increase in the share of DCS posts held by women, to two-thirds (102), up from half in 2018.

It also highlighted the continuing decline in the number of ‘twin-hatted’ directors – those who hold the DCS role alongside the director of adult social services position in their authority. There were 13 of these as of March 2024, down from 56 in 2017.

Children’s services ‘need stable leadership’

“In an ever-complex landscape, children’s services need consistent and stable leadership to deliver for the children and families that we serve,” said ADCS president Andy Smith.

On the number of interim appointments, he said: “Most interim appointments were filled, in the main, by former substantive directors of children’s services or assistant directors. However, the role of DCS is both unique and challenging and we need to pay more attention to how we support current DCSs to ensure we retain valuable skills, expertise, and experience within the sector.”

In his inaugural presidential speech last month, Smith said improving equality, diversity and inclusion across the association, and in children’s services more generally, was a priority for his year at the helm.

He welcomed the “slight increase in ethnic diversity amongst DCSs in 2023 compared to 2022”, but added: “There is still more to do in terms of translating our words and commitment to improving diversity, in its widest sense, into actions that our workforce, and our communities, will recognise.”

Incoming Association of Directors of Children’s Services president Andy Smith is passionate about social work’s potential to improve children’s lives.

While such a belief is commonplace among senior managers in local authority children’s services, for Smith, it is personal. He was one of those children whose lives were transformed by a social worker.

Smith was taken into care as a baby, spending the first 11 years of his life in a foster home before those same carers adopted him.

From the age of seven, up until his adoption, he had the same social worker, with whom he remained in contact into his 20s.

‘My social worker was pivotal in shaping my career’

It was a relationship that was pivotal in his decision to join the profession some 30 years ago.

“I had a really positive experience of social workers,” he says. “My social worker was really pivotal in shaping my career and my aspirations and dreams.”

This was not just based on his experiences as a child but also on what he learned reading his case files while training to be a social worker.

“It showed there was lots of good practice going on,” he says. “Even though it’s a long time ago, there are lots of similarities with what we talk about in terms of good relationship-based social work.”

A passion for social work

His positive experience is one he shares with the social workers he oversees in Derby council as its strategic director of people, a role that encompasses the statutory positions of director of children’s services (DCS) and director of adult social services (DASS).

“It’s given me a real passion for social work and the good that it can effect in people lives,” he says. “It feels very instinctive for me to talk about the power of social work, even 40 years later. It’s definitely shaped who I am.”

It is also a reason why, despite having been a senior manager for almost two decades, he maintains his social work registration.

“I’m very proud to be a registered social worker,” he says. “Even though I don’t practise on the ground, I keep connected to practise.”

Being a director ‘is a tough gig’

As one of a declining breed of “twin-hatted” directors, Smith has a lot on his plate, managing budgetary, service, workforce and political pressures across children’s and adults’ services.

He is helped, he says, by working for a “supportive organisation” in which “adults’ and children’s services are a corporate priority”.

But with 42 of the then 152 local authorities having had a change of DCS in 2022-23 and a report last year highlighting the many pressures on those holding the position, he admits that being a director is a “tough gig”.

“The context of operating as a DCS is something that feels as pressured now, if not more so than before,” he says. “One of my priorities [as president] is ensuring we support DCSs.”

Promoting greater diversity

As he made clear in his inaugural speech as president, this includes promoting greater racial diversity at director level.

Just 6% of DCSs were black or from a non-white ethnic minority as of 31 March 2023, compared with 18% of the population of England and Wales in the 2021 census and 25% of statutory children’s social workers in England, as of September 2023. 

In his speech, he said promoting a more diverse workforce was an ADCS priority and that it was committed to “highlighting, challenging and addressing issues of disproportionality, discrimination and systemic barriers that limit opportunity where they exist”.

Like his two immediate predecessors, Steve Crocker and John Pearce, Smith comes to the presidency at a time of great flux for children’s social care in England.

Crocker’s tenure coincided with the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care’s final report and the Department for Education’s response, through its Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy to reform the sector. Pearce’s term saw the ADCS seeking to influence the DfE’s approach to implementing the reforms.

A coming general election

This will continue under Smith, who will also be the president that takes association into and through the next general election, which will most likely take place in the autumn.

With Labour predicted to win, it is not clear how children’s social care policy would change as a result. Chief social worker for children and families Isabelle Trowler said recently that she did not feel the election would make a difference to the trajectory of the Stable Homes reforms (see box).

‘Lack of urgency’ to reform social care

The ADCS broadly supports the reforms and their aims: investing in early support for families and in kinship carers so fewer children need child protection interventions or to go into care; boosting the supply of care placements to tackle the current insufficiency; and improving the quality and sufficiency the social work workforce to improve relationship-based practice with families.

Its key arguments with the DfE are that the reforms lack sufficient urgency at a time when councils are struggling to keep the current system running.

“[Stable Homes] makes the case robustly that if we fail to invest in early help, we will see escalation of cost,” Smith says.

However, currently, the key reform to enable this – family help – is being tested in three areas, with seven to follow later this year. Smith says it is imperative for the approach to be tested as quickly as possible “so that we can demonstrate to the Treasury that there’s an absolute case for investment because that will lead to better outcomes and better value for money for the public purse”.

A rising care population with increased complexity of need

Trowler has said that the key success measure for the reforms will be a “massive cut” in the size of the care population. However, not only has that population grown in each of the last 15 years as councils lose foster carers and the secure home sector shrinks, but they are also working with more young people experiencing complex needs who highly tailored placements.

Placement insufficiency is driving significant cost.

Despite councils having budgeted 11% more in real terms for children’s social care in 2023-24 than 2022-23, County Councils Network research last autumn found that the 41 shire authorities alone were facing a combined £319m overspend during that financial year. 

Meanwhile, council spending on independent children’s homes more than doubled from 2015-16 to 2021-22, according to research by market analysts Revolution Consulting.

Stable Homes, Built on Love includes a number of measures designed to tackle the issue, including recruiting more foster carers – which the government is backing with £27m from 2023-25 – while the government has recently announced further funding to build children’s homes.

‘More action needed on care placements’

However, the ADCS is sceptical about the DfE’s key placements reform – creating regional care co-operatives to take over responsibility for commissioning – and, in any case, this is also years from implementation, with the department yet to announce the two pathfinder areas that will test the change.

On this too, Smith insists more urgent action is required.

“We need a properly resourced plan to tackle what is a placement sufficiency crisis and some of it cannot wait for some of the medium- and long-term plans in Stable Homes.”

In an echo of his presidential predecessors, he is also that this requires action on “profiteering” by large private equity-backed providers. He says that the £310m in profit made from publicly-funded children’s social care by 19 of the 20 biggest placement providers in 2021-22 (source: Revolution Consulting) “doesn’t feel right”.

Tackling ‘profiteering’

“I’m talking about a relatively small amount of providers who are generating a huge amount of profit,” he says. “If the government were minded there are things they could do to manage and sort that.”

In his presidential speech, he expressed support for care review lead Josh MacAlister’s call for a windfall tax on the profits of the largest providers. Pearce has previously called for national rules for the provider market, including ensuring that they charge a fair cost for care.

The government is not deaf to these calls, having promised to bring forward measures to combat profiteering in the children’s homes market later this year.

The DfE has already acted on ADCS calls to tackle what the association also described as “profiteering” in the social work agency market, through the national rules due to come into force in the summer of this year.

Qualified support for new agency social work rules

Smith strongly supports this with one caveat: the ADCS opposes the DfE’s decision to go back on its original proposal to ban outright the use of agency project teams. The practice of some agencies restricting the supply of locums to such teams, driving up costs, is directors’ chief bugbear with this market.

Under the DfE’s revised plans, project teams will be permitted but their practice must be fully under councils’ management, with the engagement of each individual worker subject to all the other national rules, including regional price caps on what authorities pay agencies.

However, in his speech, Smith said that there were “no benefits of the project team model being deployed in statutory case holding work other than the opportunities it provides for agencies to generate unacceptably high profits”.

He tells Community Care: “I think that’s something we will need to monitor the impact of going forward. It didn’t go as far as we would have liked but we’re in a better place than we were.”

Councils across England face insolvency without national rules to regulate mounting care placement costs, the Association of Directors of Children’s Services’ (ADCS) president has warned.

John Pearce told Community Care that these should include a calculated fair cost for care and rules on provider behaviour, in an interview at this year’s National Children and Adult Services Conference (NCASC).

Though he said the idea had not yet gained traction with the Department for Education, children’s minister David Johnston subsequently told NCASC that the DfE may be open to the idea.

Pearce’s comments came on the day that Nottingham council declared that it would not be able to set a balanced budget this year, citing children’s social care demand and costs as a cause.

At the same time, the Local Government Association released research showing authorities as a whole were on course to exceed their approximately £4.7bn care placement budgets by £680m (14%), following a similar overspend last year.

The association’s report, based on a survey of 124 of the 153 councils, also showed the proportion of placements costing £10,000 a week or more rose from 0.2% of the total in 2018-19 to 1.6% in 2022-23.

Factors driving placement costs

The situation is the result of councils lacking sufficient placements of the right kind in the right places to meet children’s needs. This has been driven by factors including:

• Fifteen consecutive year-on-year rises in the care population.
• More and more children with complex needs going into care and requiring more intensive provision, such as solo placements, high staff ratios or, increasingly, deprivation of their liberty.
• Reductions in the numbers of secure children’s home and inpatient mental health beds, removing alternative options for these children.
• A fall in the number of mainstream fostering households.
• A mismatch between the location of children’s homes and areas of need.

Councils’ lack of choice over placements has pushed up prices, particularly for children’s homes.

While the number of registered places in homes rose by 11% from 2016-22 (source: Ofsted), council spending on private providers – who run the vast majority – grew by 105% over this period (source: Revolution Consulting).

Government response criticised

In response, the government has provided councils with £259m from 2022-25 to deliver more children’s home places and adopted proposals from the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care to test the creation of regional care co-operatives (RCC).

These would take over individual councils’ responsibilities for commissioning and providing placements, in order to pool expertise and planning capacity and give local government greater scope to dictate terms to providers.

However, the ADCS has warned that there is “no evidence” that RCCs would address pressures on the placement market, creating them would be “costly and time consuming” and they risked triggering a mass exist of providers.

John Pearce, ADCS president, 2023-24

In his speech to the NCASC yesterday, Pearce said there was no DfE plan to tackle the “unmanageable costs of children’s
social care homes”.

Risk of widespread council insolvency

Speaking later to Community Care, he said: “We’ve been very clear around our concerns about regional care co-operatives – but even if you set them aside, they are going to take five years [to set up] by which time no local authority in the country will be financially solvent.”

Those comments came as Nottingham council issued a section 114 notice, stating that it could not meet its legal obligation to deliver a balanced budget in 2023-24, with the volume and complexity of children’s social care packages a key driver.

As a result, it must cease new spending commitments and will need to come up with a plan to bring its budget into balance. This will likely involve further government intervention, to which it is already subject due to past financial problems.

Its action follows the issuing of section 114 notices by Birmingham council, in September 2023, Thurrock, in December 2022, Croydon, in November 2022 and Slough, in July 2021.

Need for national rules on care placements

Pearce said the DfE should follow the action it had taken in relation to agency social work by setting national rules to govern the market.

This should include open-book accounting – where providers seeking contracts show commissioners their costings and profit calculations – and the modelling of a fair cost of care, providing the basis for price caps.

He also said there should be rules around provider behaviour, citing the practice of services charging for empty beds in homes as one he would like to end. Pearce added:

We need to move away from the Wild West, where the providers can do what they want.”

He said that while the ADCS had put forward proposals along these lines to the DfE, “to date none of these have been taken forward”.

Minister holds open possibility of action 

However, Johnston subsequently told the NCASC that the DfE was looking into what action it could take in relation to placement costs.

“We are very aware of the pressures that the cost of children’s social care are putting on you at the moment,” he said.

“We are looking at how the market operates, the extent to which profiteering is taking place and what we can do about that and looking at, at a minimum, what standards we can have in the market.”

He added: “I can’t give you lots of details now. I have a team  who is looking at this issue and trying to find out exactly what is going on.

“We’ve all got our examples of very expensive placements and not bearing any relation to the cost of those placements. So watch this space as we know this is an area that needs our focus.”

Rising number of high-cost placements

In its report, the LGA said high-cost placements (over £10,000 a week) had become increasingly prevalent, with 91% of authorities saying they had at least one in 2022-23, up from 23% in 2018-19.

The key drivers of high-cost placements were a lack of choice of placement – cited by 98% of authorities – children exhibiting “challenging behaviours” (93%) and children having complex or significant mental health issues (92%).

On behalf of providers, the Children’s Home Association (CHA) said: “The operational costs for children’s residential care have increased at an unprecedented level over the last four years.

‘Multiple factors’ behind cost rise – provider body

“There are multiple factors that have impacted on the cost of providing children’s residential care as with all organisations. Inflation on supplies and salaries have been significant.

“Both the CHA and the LGA have made the government aware of the impact of the lack of sufficient funding in this sector.

“Unless this lack of funding is addressed it will not be possible to address the issues impacting both the cost, quality and availability of placements for children and young people in need of residential care.”

Children’s social care reforms

In its response to the LGA report, the DfE pointed to its children’s social care reform agenda, set out earlier this year in the Stable Homes, Built on Love paper.

“Our ambitious reforms to children’s social care will focus on more early support for families, reducing the need for crisis response at a later stage, with plans backed by £200m to test and refine our approach,” said a spokesperson.

“We are also investing £259m to support local authorities to create more placements for children in high-quality and safe homes.”

Action must be taken to reduce the increasing demands on council social workers from age assessments of unaccompanied asylum seekers, a leading director has said.

Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) president John Pearce said the association was working with the Home Office and Department for Education to refine the asylum age check process to reduce the amount of social work capacity it required.

There were 3,140 age-disputed cases resolved from April 2022 to March 2023, up from 2,777 in 2021-22 and just 913 in 2021-22, according to Home Office figures.

Age assessments are generally the responsibility of the local authority in which the claimant first presents (known as a “spontaneous arrival”), or where they have been moved to under the government’s National Transfer Scheme (NTS), which is designed to relieve pressure on ports of entry, such as Kent.

However, since 2021, the Home Office has accommodated some unaccompanied young people in hotels, due to a lack of council placements.

Pearce claimed the department was treating age-disputed claimants it was accommodating as spontaneous arrivals in the council where the hotel was based, which he said was “clearly not the case” and “simply not acceptable”, in his speech to this month’s ADCS conference.

‘Huge pressure’ from age assessments

In a subsequent interview with Community Care, Pearce said this was placing “huge pressure” on the local authorities concerned and that there was a need to revisit the process of age assessment more generally.

“There’s a huge social work capacity required around those age assessments,” he said. “As we’re seeing more and more young people who are age disputed, it’s really important that we have an effective process that doesn’t absorb huge amounts of social work capacity.”

Earlier this year, the Home Office launched the National Age Assessment Board, which is designed to take on a significant proportion of assessments from councils.

Home Office struggling to recruit social workers

However, it has struggled to recruit social workers to the board, with just 40% of the required complement in post as of April this year, a year after recruitment started. As a result, the NAAB is only operating in two regions, London and the West Midlands.

Pearce told Community Care that, even if the NAAB were operating at full capacity, “that would be nowhere near enough to meet demand”.

He said the ADCS was working with the Home Office and DfE to “develop a much more effective process and one that doesn’t require significant amounts of social work capacity”.

In his conference speech, he highlighted that the legal case that defines the current approach to age assessments, B v London Borough of Merton, was 20 years old.

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The government should set an expectation that frontline children’s social workers carry out face-to-face practice, in the light of concerns about the rise of remote working.

That was the message from the Association of Directors of Children’s Services in its response to a Department for Education (DfE) consultation on setting rules for the use of agency staff in local authority child and family social work.

Its call follows concerns from Ofsted about staff – particularly agency workers – taking fully remote roles because of the shift to virtual working triggered by the pandemic.

The inspectorate cited examples of staff living in rural areas taking posts in London boroughs, at higher salaries, without the need to travel, in a report on the sector’s recovery from Covid, published last July.

Remote working concerns

“This is now possible because of remote working, which enables some desk-based social work to be done from anywhere,” Ofsted said at the time.

“However, this way of working is concerning, as it could erode the quality of social work if social workers lack local knowledge and understanding of the communities that they serve, which are important elements of social work.”

The ADCS raised the issue in relation to a DfE proposal to require a three-month ‘cool-off’ period before a social worker can take up an agency post after leaving a permanent role within the same region.

The association said it wanted this extended to six months, and to local authorities that border the region in question.

“Consideration must also be given to the increased use of remote working in recent years,” it added. “If a social worker is able to work remotely then the mandatory ‘cool off’ period will have little impact.

“To mitigate this potential issue, DfE should be clear that case holding agency child and family social workers are always expected to deliver face to face work with children and families.”

The ADCS strongly pushed for the DfE to introduce curbs on agency work, and influenced its proposals, which the department published in February, alongside its plans for wider reform of children’s social care.

Directors have become increasingly concerned by the rising costs of agency work, amid mounting vacancies, the impact of workforce instability on children and the increasing practice of agencies supplying staff through project teams, sometimes with protected caseloads.

Adverse impact of increased agency work

In its consultation response, the association warned: “Local authorities are experiencing an increase in the number of their permanently employed social workers who leave their role to join an agency, leading to far higher rates of staff turnover at an inflated cost.

“This does not benefit the children and families who rely on a consistency of worker who knows their story and has built a strong, lasting relationship.”

However, while backing the proposed changes, the ADCS repeated its call for the DfE to bring forward the implementation date from its current target of spring 2024.

“The cost pressure on local authorities and the instability for children is growing quickly and significantly and ADCS urges the DfE to consider more timely action,” it added.

Consultation on the proposals is open until 11 May 2023, and you can respond by completing this online survey.