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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.”

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English councils have increased spending on family support services since the start of the decade following years of stagnation, an analysis has found.

Annual real-terms spending grew by 21% from 2020-21 to 2023-24, compared with 2% from 2014-15 to 2020-21, found research on early intervention funding carried out for the Children’s Charities Coalition (Action for Children, Barnardo’s, the Children’s Society, National Children’s Bureau and NSPCC).

The analysis, by research firm Pro Bono Economics, found that spending on early intervention services in general – Sure Start centres, youth services and family support – grew by 13% (just over £300m) in real-terms from 2020-21 to 2023-24.

Family support compared with statutory social care spending

This was driven by growth in family support spending specifically, which increased from £1.44bn in 2020-21 to £1.74bn in 2023-24, in real-terms.

Despite the increase, family support spending was well below councils’ net expenditure on safeguarding children (about £3.3bn) and looked-after children (£7.7bn) in 2023-24.

The government’s children’s social care reforms, which are being rolled out from this month, are designed to engineer a shift in the balance of spending towards early intervention by enabling more children to remain, safely, with their families, through improved support.

New model of working with families

Under the Families First Partnership programme, councils are expected to set up multidisciplinary family help teams with responsibility for families with multiple and complex needs who previously would have come under targeted early help, child in need or child protection services.

The model is designed to provide families with a consistent practitioner – a family help lead practitioner (FHLP) – to carry out direct work and co-ordinate other services, to enable the family to receive tailored support as early as possible.

While new multi-agency child protection teams will be responsible for carrying out enquiries under section 47 of the Children Act 1989 and other safeguarding functions, family help teams and FLHPs will remain involved and continue to provide support to the family in those circumstances.

Additional funding for prevention

The reforms are backed by a £270m children’s social care prevention grant, which councils are expected to combine with £253.5m previously spent on the Supporting Families programme to develop and rollout the new approach.

Around £13m of the £270m grant is designed to fund the expansion of family group decision making meetings, under which extended families come together to make decisions about how children should be safeguarded where statutory services have concerns.

Under the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is currently going through Parliament, councils must offer families an FGDM meeting whenever they are considering issuing care proceedings, to provide family networks with the opportunity to identify alternatives to the child going into care.

Average social worker caseloads have fallen to their lowest recorded level in local authority children’s services in England, according to Department for Education (DfE) figures.

Based on submissions from councils, the DfE found that 15.4 cases were held per full-time equivalent (FTE) practitioner in September 2023, down from 16.0 12 months earlier and 16.6 in 2022. The department started recording average caseloads in 2017, when the figure stood at 17.7.

The rate is calculated by dividing the number of children or young people allocated to FTE children’s social workers by the number of FTE practitioners.

The average fell in every region, in 2023-24, bar one, the North West, where it rose slightly, from 16.5 to 16.6. The sharpest fall was in the East Midlands (from 16.2 to 15.0), with London continuing to have the lowest overall average caseload (13.8, down from 14.4).

Falling number of case-holding social workers

In previous years, the caseload rate has fallen due to an increase in the number of FTE children’s social workers holding cases, amid a relatively stable number of cases.

However, from September 2023 to September 2024, their number fell by 1.5%, from about 21,111.4 to 20,803.5, with the drop in the rate driven instead by a 4.9% fall in the number of cases held by practitioners, from 337,055 to 320,461.

This is the lowest number of cases held by FTE children’s social workers since 2017, when the figure stood at 316,647.

Also, the fall over the 12 months to September 2024 was far steeper than the drop in the number of children in need recorded by councils in the year to March 2024. This fell from 403,090 to 399,460, a drop of 0.9%.

Opening up of child in need assessments beyond social workers

One possible explanation for the discrepancy is a change to the Working Together to Safeguard Children statutory guidance in 2023 that permitted councils to allocate child in need assessments to non-social work qualified staff, such as early help or family support staff or social work apprentices.

Previously, the guidance, which councils must follow other than in exceptional circumstances, had stipulated that such assessments should be carried out by social workers. Cases must be overseen by a social work-qualified manager or practice supervisor, under the 2023 version of the guidance.

The amendment to Working Together was designed to enable the creation of multidisciplinary family help teams, which would be responsible for both targeted early help and child in need cases.

Part of wider reforms to children’s social care, these are designed to prevent families from having to change practitioner when they move between early help and statutory children’s social care, while also providing them with earlier and more supportive assistance to resolve challenges in their lives.

Family help is currently being tested in the 10 families first for children pathfinders, before a planned national rollout in 2025-26, funded by a £270m DfE grant.

Risk concerns where social workers are not case-holders 

The changes to Working Together were welcomed by the Association of Directors of Children’s Services for enabling councils to deploy their practitioner resource flexibly and focus their social workers on more complex cases.

However, both Ofsted and the British Association of Social Workers raised concerns about a potential increase in risks to children from non-social work qualified staff carrying out child in need assessments.

These concerns were echoed by respondents to a recent Community Care poll, 46% of whom said that having non-social work qualified staff carry out child in need assessments “would carry too much risk for children”. A further 43% were supportive in principle, but said alternatively qualified practitioners would need appropriate training and supervision to carry out the task.

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Practitioner opinion is split over non-social work qualified staff carrying out child in need assessments, a poll has found.

Under 2023 reforms to the Working Together to Safeguard Children guidance, staff other than social workers can take on child in need assessments, under the oversight of a social work-qualified manager or practice supervisor.

This approach is currently being tested by the 10 families first for children pathfinder areas, where assessments and cases have been allocated to a range of staff, as part of the development of family help teams. These are responsible for targeted early help and child in need services and include social workers, family support staff and practitioners from disciplines such as substance misuse or domestic abuse.

Under the government’s children’s social care reforms, family help will be extended nationwide in 2025-26, though it will be up to individual councils to decide how far they do – or do not – ring-fence child in need assessments and cases for social workers.

Divided opinion

A Community Care poll with 800 votes found practitioners were divided on having non-social work qualified staff carry out child in need assessments.

Almost half of respondents (46%) said having non-social work qualified staff carry out child in need assessments carried “too much risk for children”.

This chimes with concerns raised by the British Association of Social Workers and Ofsted about the 2023 Working Together changes after they were announced.

Another 43% agreed “in principle” with the idea, but said the staff would need “appropriate training and supervision” for this to work.

Only 11% fully backed the idea, saying that many alternatively qualified staff were “highly skilled” and it would free up social workers’ time.

Practitioners have ‘experience, but lack knowledge’

One social worker, in the comments of a related article, called the idea “dangerous”, adding that the practitioners would have “experience, but lack the knowledge”.

“It’s a short-term, cost-effective measure that will bear huge costs in the long term, not to mention the human cost and impact that could well be catastrophic.”

However, Tahin responded by saying that there should be less “assumed knowledge”, from having a social work qualification, and “more promotion of experience”.

What do you think of alternatively qualified staff carrying out child in need assessments and holding these cases?

There is strong evidence that parenting support services improve outcomes for children and adults in families experiencing adversity, councils have been told.

The latest government-commissioned practice guide to what works in children’s social care said interventions for parents of children aged 0-10 could improve parenting practices and child behaviour, lessen levels of stress and support adults mental health.

It also highlighted the vital importance of practitioners’ skills in building trusting relationships with, and in empowering, parents, and also the value placed by staff and parents alike on interventions that recognised the interconnections between parents’ and children’s needs.

Case for prioritising parenting support ‘has never been stronger’

Sector what works body Foundations, which published the guide today, said it was based on the first major review of UK and international evidence on parenting support for families experiencing adversity, including adult mental health problems, substance misuse or domestic abuse.

On the back of the guide, Foundations’ deputy chief executive, Donna Molloy said: “As councils struggle to cope with the costs of children’s social care, our evidence shows that proven models of parenting support can help to keep children safe with their families, improve their outcomes and alleviate pressure on an already overstretched system.

“The case for prioritising proven parenting interventions has never been stronger.”

Evidence to meet government social care outcomes

The practice guide is the second of a series of Department for Education-commissioned resources from Foundations designed to provide senior leaders in councils and partner agencies with the strongest available evidence to deliver on the outcomes in the children’s social care national framework.

The DfE-issued statutory guidance, published in 2023 under the previous government’s children’s social care reforms, sets four overarching objectives for the sector and three key enablers for achieving them:

• Outcome 1: children, young people and families stay together and get the help they need.
• Outcome 2: children and young people are supported by their family network.
• Outcome 3: children and young people are safe in and outside of their homes.
• Outcome 4: children in care and care leavers have stable, loving homes.
• Enabler 1: multi-agency working is prioritised and effective.
• Enabler 2: leaders drive conditions for effective practice.
• Enabler 3: the workforce is equipped and effective.

The first guide, on kinship care, was published in October last year, and the one on parenting through adversity for parents of babies and children aged 0-10 is the first of four on parenting support. The others will cover support for families in adversity with children aged 11-19, parents or carers of children with disabilities or severe mental illness and adoptive and foster parents.

Rising parental mental health needs ahead of family help reforms

The parenting through adversity guide comes amid a growth in the numbers of children in need assessments identifying parental mental health or substance misuse problems, which directors of children’s services have warned is increasing risks to the youngest children.

At the same time, councils are set to implement significant reforms to the way they support families, through the rollout of the family help model in 2025-26.

This involves the merger of targeted early help and child in need services into multidisciplinary teams, designed to provide families experiencing adversity with early, non-stigmatising help, =to resolve issues and prevent them escalating into child protection concerns.

Though the government is providing a £270m grant to implement the changes, the reforms come with councils under significant financial strain.

Guide ‘will help councils focus resources on what works’

Foundations’ head of practice guides, social worker Nimal Jude, said the latest guide would enable authorities to determine where to invest their resources.

“We are acutely aware of some of the workforce pressures and the wider financial situations that local areas are in,” she said. 

“It feels like this guide has come at such a crucial time during this transformation to family help, because you can really make some decisions about what things that you might want to scale back and what things that you might want to focus attention on, not least because you can now focus your attention with the full confidence that this is actually the best available evidence.”

The evidence base

The guide is based on two systematic reviews of the evidence around parenting support for families with multiple and complex needs.

The first, carried out by the Centre for Evidence and Implementation (CEI), in partnership with the universities of Oxford, Amsterdam and Monash, examined which interventions relevant to the UK, had the strongest evidence for reducing child maltreatment or improving child outcomes, along with what practice and delivery approaches contributed to success.

It examined 95 randomised controlled trials – where participants are randomly allocated into a group that receives the intervention and a control group – of 50 parenting interventions, finding:

• Small to moderate statistically significant effects on children’s emotional and behavioural problems, child wellbeing and parent-child relationships.
• Small to moderate statistically significant effects on promoting positive parenting (for example, appropriate disciplining, praise, warmth, and nurturing behaviours) and reducing negative parenting (for example, hostile parenting or laxness).
• Small statistically significant effects on parental mental health and reducing parental stress.
• Small but non-significant effects on reducing parental maltreatment and child abuse risk.

Strengthening parent-child relationships 

Based on the CEI’s systematic review, Foundations said there was “strong evidence” for the benefits of providing parenting interventions to strengthen parent-child relationships, and that councils should make these available to families with children aged 0-3.

It said these should be based on, and delivered by practitioners well-trained in, attachment and/or social learning theory (which posits that children learn through observation, including parental modelling). These staff should be able to observe and reflect on how parents respond to children’s cues and explore parents’ own attachment experiences.

The guide also said there was “strong evidence” for councils commissioning interventions to improve child behaviours, reduce negative parenting practices and improve positive practices.

Improving child behaviour and parenting practices

In relation to behaviour, key features shared by effective interventions were supporting parents in setting clear expectations and boundaries and promoting child-led interactions.

Promoting positive parenting can include practitioners taking on a coaching role, which requires them being skilled in coaching techniques and being able to build long-lasting, trusting relationships with parents.

The guide also said there was “strong evidence” that parenting interventions can reduce parental stress and improve mental health for those with mild-to-moderate problems.

Improving mental health

It said practitioners should be skilled in understanding the impacts of stress on parents experiencing adversity and should be given time to develop relationships with them, to enable parents to learn new skills and make use of feedback.

While the guide stressed that that parenting interventions were not sufficient to achieve significant changes to mental health, it said there was evidence they could improve parenting skills, even in adults with clinical levels of illness.

It said these programmes should involve practitioners offering guidance on child development and supporting parents’ abilities to manage their emotions.

Evidence ‘promising’ in relation to reducing harm

On reducing the risk of harm to children, Foundations said the level of evidence for parenting interventions was “promising”.

It said programmes that involved a fixed and structured series of sessions tended to be more effective in this area than those that were flexible.

The guide added that local leaders should examine the need to invest in these services for families with children on the edge of care and in the rollout of family help.

Vital importance of practitioners’ interpersonal skills

Alongside the CEI review, Foundations carried out its own systematic review of studies on the barriers and enablers to successful implementation of parenting interventions for families in adversity and on parents’ views, experiences and preferences in relation to these. This drew upon 33 studies.

Among two findings that had “high” certainty, based on the strength of the evidence, was that practitioner interpersonal behaviours were “essential to building trusting relationships and empowering parents”.

The review said parents valued practitioner characteristics such as openness, non-judgmentalism and encouragement, which facilitated the development of the trust that was “essential” in promoting change.

Building trust was supported by an initial home visit, communication outside of scheduled sessions, regular attendance from the parent and a consistent workforce, with parents highlighting the challenges of doing so when workers changed.

Recognising that parents’ and children’s needs are ‘intertwined’

The other finding that was deemed to be of high certainty was that both parents and practitioners value interventions that recognise “the intertwined relationship between parents’ practical and psychological needs and the needs of their children”.

Practitioners appreciated that supporting the parent, by focusing on their practical, social and emotional needs, was often the best way to help the child, with this approach welcomed by parents, the review said.

Based on its review, Foundations identified 12 principles for working with families in delivering parenting interventions:

1. Tailoring parenting support to ages and stages of child development.
2. Using strengths-based approaches to engage parents and offering parenting support across the system.
3. Ensuring that parents from minoritised ethnic backgrounds have equitable access to effective parenting interventions and that these are delivered in a way that fully meets
   their needs.
4. Understanding that parenting interventions work well for families where the parent has poor mental health, and, when delivered successfully, support parents to improve parent and child outcomes.
5. Prioritising face-to-face delivery of support.
6. Implementing both fixed and flexible delivery models to support a mixed local offer and prioritising more structured interventions to effectively reduce the risk of serious harm to children, directing resources where they are most needed.
7. Tailoring local programmes to meet the specific needs of families, offering both group and individual options to support engagement and provide parents with choice.
8. Focusing on careful implementation, effective delivery, and ongoing quality assurance to ensure the success of interventions.
9. That a strong local offer should start with a robust population needs analysis and involve place-based system leadership to develop a multi-agency offer.
10. That local areas should have effective referral routes into parenting interventions from a range of local services.
11. That effective parenting support requires a skilled and integrated workforce to deliver effective interventions.
12. Parenting support should form part of a wider system of support that strengthens the resources available to parents.

The Department for Education (DfE) is to quiz councils on the balance of social workers and alternatively qualified practitioners in family help teams, which authorities are expected to roll out over the next year.

The requirement to provide this information is likely to be included in conditions set by the DfE for councils’ use of the £270m children’s social care prevention grant in 2025-26.

A core purpose of the grant is the rollout of family help, which involves merging existing targeted early help and child in need services into multidisciplinary teams including social workers, family support staff and practitioners from disciplines such as substance misuse or domestic abuse.

Under the approach, any of these professionals could take on the role of “lead practitioner” in working with families who need targeted early help or whose children have been deemed to be in need.

Removal of social work requirement for child in need assessments

While councils had previously been required, under Working Together to Safeguard Children, to allocate child in need assessments to social workers, this requirement was removed by 2023 revisions to the statutory guidance.

Under the current policy, staff, including those outside of the local authority, will be able to take on the role, now termed ‘lead practitioner’, under the oversight of a social work qualified manager or practice supervisor.

The approach of allocating assessments and cases to any of a range of practitioners is being trialled by the 10 families first for children pathfinder areas. These local areas are testing elements of the previous Conservative government’s children’s social care reforms that are being continued by its Labour successor.

Besides family help, the pathfinder includes creating multi-agency child protection teams and involving family networks in decisions about children’s care when families are struggling, including by providing financial support packages to help keep children safe at home.

Duties to set up multi-agency teams and offer family meetings

These reforms are being partly implemented through the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which will require councils, police and health partners to set up the multi-agency teams and oblige local authorities to offer parents a family group decision making (FGDM) meeting when considering issuing care proceedings in relation to their children.

They will also be put into effect nationally through the children’s social care prevention grant, in relation to which the government issued draft guidance this week.

This said the grant was ring-fenced for “the implementation of family help and child protection reforms” and the implementation of the FGDM duty.

Supporting families ‘to overcome challenges early’

Funding should be used “across the full breadth of preventative services, including early help, family help, family networks and child protection,” said the draft guidance. “These should support families to overcome challenges at the earliest opportunity, prevent escalation and effectively intervene with high-risk problems.”

Councils should use the funding in tandem with the £253m allocated in 2025-26 to the Supporting Families programme – under which a key worker is allocated to support families with multiple needs – in investing in family help and other preventive support. Though this money has been rolled into a broader children and families grant, worth £414m, only the Supporting Families money should be used as part of the family help rollout.

The government said some of the children’s social care prevention grant – potentially about 30% – should be used on the design and transformation of services, rather than their delivery. As part of this, councils must appoint a named lead responsible for running the programme, along with a senior practice lead, whose role would include practice and cultural change.

Short- and medium-term objectives

The draft guidance said councils should, through the use of the grant, see progress against a set of short- and medium-term objectives.

It said the short-term goals were:

• Professionals and agencies understanding their new roles and responsibilities and how to work together effectively.
• Improved staff knowledge of, and confidence in providing, effective support for children and families.
• Families having an improved understanding of the services and support available to them.
• Families feeling more involved in the design of services.

The medium-term objectives listed were:

• Improved experiences for children and families, including improved relationships and trust with services, families receiving the right support at the right time and wider family networks being involved earlier.
• Services better meeting the needs of children and families.
• Improved decision making and case management.
• Improved information and data sharing between professionals and agencies.

Reporting requirements

The draft guidance said councils would need to report regularly to the DfE to provide assurance they were meeting the objectives. This would include the quarterly collection of data, including:

• Detail on the family help workforce, for example, the number of social work-qualified and alternatively qualified workers and the number of local authority and non-local authority employed practitioners.
• Information on the children benefiting from family help and child protection services, for example, the numbers receiving family help.
• The number of FGDM meetings offered prior to or at the letter before proceedings to parents or those with parental responsibility and the number of meetings facilitated after the offer is made.

In setting out the local government finance settlement this week, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) said councils should use the draft guidance to support their financial planning for 2025-26. Final guidance is likely to be issued shortly.

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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Legislation to reform children’s social care has cleared its first parliamentary hurdle.

MPs approved the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill in principle yesterday (8 January 2024), following a debate in the House of Commons that saw a Conservative amendment that would have blocked the bill overwhelmingly defeated.

The bill will now be considered in detail, and likely amended, by a committee of MPs, before returning to the Commons to be further considered and voted upon, prior to consideration by the House of Lords.

With Labour’s huge majority in the Commons and the Lords unlikely to hold up the legislation, the bill is likely to become law in the spring, though some measures will not be implemented until future years.

‘Biggest reform in a generation’

Introducing the bill, education secretary Bridget Phillipson said it was part of “the biggest reform of children’s social care in a generation”, though one inherited in significant part from its Conservative predecessor. As well as the measures in the bill, this includes:

• The England-wide rollout of the family help model in 2025-26. Family help involves merging targeted early help and child in need services into multidisciplinary teams, designed to provide families in need with better, less stigmatising support, with a view to keeping families together.
• The trialling of financial allowances for some kinship carers in order to improve their ability to care for children.
• Rolling out regional fostering hubs to improve recruitment of foster carers and tackle existing shortages.

Prioritising keeping children with families

Phillipson said that the reforms were designed to help more children stay with their families, while improving the care system for those who could not, including by tackling provider profit levels.

“Our first priority is to keep children with their family wherever it is safe to do so, so the bill mandates all local authorities to offer family group decision making,” Phillipson told MPs. “With the guidance of skilled professionals, families with children at risk of falling into care will be supported to build a plan that works for them. We are strengthening support for kinship care, so that vulnerable children can live with the people they know and trust, wherever that is possible.

“However, despite the best efforts of all involved, some children will inevitably need to enter care, so we must reform the system so that it works for them. I know that members right across this House share my outrage at the excessive and exploitative profit making that we have seen from some private providers. It is shameful, it is unacceptable, and it will end.”

Conservative opposition

Shadow education secretary Laura Trott said the Conservatives was broadly supportive of the children’s social care measures in the bill, though was opposed to its proposals to place academy schools under similar requirements to local authority schools.

Its defeated amendment also sought to require the establishment of a national public inquiry into child sexual exploitation (CSE) by grooming gangs, an issue that has triggered a huge political row because of repeated attacks on the government over the issue by X owner Elon Musk.

Pledge to introduce mandatory reporting

While the government has not ruled out such an inquiry, it has instead announced the implementation of measures proposed by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), which issued its final report in 2022. These comprise:

• Introducing mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse by those in positions of trust over children, with criminal, as well as professional, sanctions for a failure to do so.
• Creating a performance framework, with data collection requirements, for the police concerning CSA and CSE. This responds to IICSA’s recommendation to introduce a core data set for the issue, to tackle what it found was a lack of reliable data, particularly in relation to CSE. The inquiry said the data set should include information on the characteristics of victims and alleged perpetrators of CSA/CSE, including age, sex and ethnicity, the factors that make children more vulnerable to abuse or exploitation and the settings in which abuse or exploitation occur.
• Legislating to make grooming an aggravating factor in the sentencing of child sexual offences, a recommendation from IICSA’s 2022 report on CSE by organised networks.

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The families first for children (FFC) model currently being tested in 10 areas is set to be rolled out to all local authorities, the chief social worker for children and families has said.

The planned nationwide expansion of the approach – which involves enhancing early help for families, involving family networks more in decision making and establishing specialist child protection teams – was revealed by Isabelle Trowler in a post on LinkedIn.

She was responding to a post on the launch of the FFC ‘pathfinder’ – the term used to describe the testing of the model – in the London Borough of Redbridge, one of the ten testbed areas.

Approach ‘set to be rolled out across all local authorities’

“Another launch of the pathfinders – now set to be rolled out across all local authorities and with new £££ on the table too,” she said. “The pathfinders are coming up with great design ideas about changing how we work with families – more help for families, greater protection for children.

Her post puts flesh on the bone of the government’s announcement of a £250m children’s social care prevention grant for councils in 2025-26 in a local government finance policy statement issued last month.

“This new grant will lay the groundwork for children’s social care reform, enabling direct investment in additional prevention activity through transition to family help,” said the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), in the statement.

The introduction of family help – one part of four FFC elements – was the key recommendation of the 2021-22 Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, led by now Labour MP Josh MacAlister.

Family help the key recommendation from care review

He called on the then Conservative government to invest £2bn in the approach over four years which, along with other measures, would mean that the care population was 30,000 lower in 10 years than would otherwise have been the case, MacAlister claimed.

However, the Conservatives instead decided to test the approach from 2023-25, backed by about £37m, through the FFC pathfinder.

This prompted criticisms from both MacAlister and children’s charities that delaying reform would be costly to both children and the public finances.

The Conservatives also commissioned a five-year evaluation of FFC, which is being carried out by the National Children’s Bureau and research bodies Verian and Alma Economics.

Existing Labour pledges 

The Labour government has already pledged to implement the other elements of FFC besides family help, in a policy paper, Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive, published in November 2024.

It promised to legislate to require councils to set up multi-agency safeguarding teams, involving representation from the police, health and education, to investigate child protection concerns and manage cases.

The DfE said the details of how the teams would work would be shaped by the evaluation of FFC.

It also pledged to mandate councils to offer families in pre-proceedings a family group decision making (FGDM) meeting, enabling them to be involved in decisions about their children’s future, where this is in the child’s best interests.

Thirdly, it said it would legislate to require representation from education in local safeguarding arrangements, at strategic and operational levels.

Children’s Wellbeing Bill

These measures will likely be included in the forthcoming Children’s Wellbeing Bill.

Further details of the rollout of family help will likely be set out when information is published about how councils should use the children’s social care prevention grant in 2025-26.

The government has pledged to “crack down on care providers making excessive profit” from care placements, in children’s social care reforms unveiled today.

Labour’s proposed reforms to tackle “profiteering” are similar to those put forward by its Conservative predecessor, including through the regional commissioning of care placements and increasing the transparency of providers’ pricing.

But the government also warned that, should these not work as anticipated, it would cap providers’ profit levels from children’s social care placements.

The reforms, set out in a policy paper today, also include empowering Ofsted to investigate companies running multiple children’s homes and more speedily take enforcement action against unregistered services.

The Department for Education (DfE) will also tighten recently introduced rules limiting councils’ use of agency social workers by placing these into legislation and extending them to cover other children’s social care staff.

New safeguarding requirements on councils

In addition, it will require councils to set up multi-agency child safeguarding teams, and to also offer family group decision making meetings when cases reach the pre-proceedings stage, to give family networks the chance to find alternatives to children going into care.

In response to the huge rise in children being deprived of their liberty under the powers of the High Court due to a lack of suitable placements, it will create a statutory framework for these cases.

The DfE added that its reforms, generally, would also seek to rebalance the system towards early intervention in order to keep families together, in the context of the care population standing at near-record levels.  

This continues the emphasis of the agenda set out by the Conservatives in their Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy published last year, which was itself based on the recommendations of the 2021-22 Independent Review of Children’s Social Care.

The policy paper said the legislation the DfE was proposing would be brought forward when parliamentary time allows. This is likely to be through the Children’s Wellbeing Bill, which was promised in the King’s Speech.

‘We will crack down on providers making excessive profit’

Education secretary Bridget Phillipson said the care system was “bankrupting councils, letting families down, and above all, leaving too many children feeling forgotten, powerless and invisible”.

“We will 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,” she added.

A key focus of the reforms is the rising cost of care for looked-after children, which the government said had “ballooned” from £3.1bn in 2009-10 to £7bn in 2022-23.

Photo: pla2na/Adobe Stock

This has been driven by a shortage of suitable placements located in the right areas, which some providers have been accused of exploiting to increase fees and extract undue levels of profit from children’s care.

In its 2022 report on the placements market, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) found that, among the largest 15 providers, profit margins averaged 22.6% in residential care and 19.4% in fostering.

It said this was higher than would be expected in a well-functioning market, though it rejected the case for banning or capping profits on the grounds that this would reduce incentives for providers to invest in services and further shrink supply.

Backing for regional care co-operatives

Concerns about profit have led the Labour government in Wales to issue legislation to restrict the making of profit from children’s care, with a long-term aim of eliminating it altogether.

Its counterpart in Westminster will largely follow the blueprint to tackle profit set out by the Conservatives in Stable Homes, including by creating regional care co-operatives (RCCs) to commission placements on behalf of member authorities.

Photo: momius/Adobe Stock

RCCs are currently being developed in two areas, Greater Manchester and the South East, where they will go live next year.

In its policy paper, Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive, the DfE said RCCs would “harness the collective buying power of individual local authorities”, improving value for money from commissioning, while also developing provision to fill gaps.

It said it would legislate to enable groups of councils to set up RCCs, with ministers also taking powers to direct them to do so or intervene if a co-operative was not performing at a required standard.

Boosting pricing transparency

In another echo of Stable Homes, the government said it would seek to fill gaps in councils’ data around care costs, to “enable them to negotiate effectively with providers to secure the best placement for children at the lowest possible cost”.

“We will engage with the sector to bring about greater cost and price transparency which will aid local authorities in challenging profiteering providers, as well as enabling greater central government oversight of the placements market,” it said.

However, to guard against these measures not engineering a reduction in profiteering, the government said it would legislate to obtain powers to cap profit levels from children’s care placements, which would be enacted if required.

The idea sparked concerns from provider representative body the Children’s Homes Association, which said it risked “serious unintended consequences”.

“The CHA supports efforts to eliminate profiteering, but this law will incentivise more providers to adopt offshore interest and debt-driven business models,” it warned.

Greater oversight of hardest to-replace providers

Another Stable Homes policy being taken forward by the Labour government is setting up a financial oversight regime for the hardest to replace providers, to avoid children’s care being disrupted by businesses failing.

These providers, up to parent company level, would have to supply the DfE with financial information to enable it to assess the viability of their whole organisations.

Credit: lovelyday12 / Adobe Stock

They would also have to develop contingency plans to ensure that they did not exit the market in a disorderly way, while the DfE would have enforcement powers to ensure compliance with the regime.

Regulating children’s home groups

The DfE also pledged to give Ofsted the power to investigate multiple children’s homes run by the same company. The regulator has longed called for this to enable it to scrutinise companies’ decision making in relation to issues such as admissions, ending placements, budgeting and staffing levels.

The DfE said that, despite some companies ran over 100 children’s homes, Ofsted could not hold them to account for organisational failings that affected children’s care.

Under its plans, the regulator would be able to request, and monitor the implementation of, provider-wider improvement plans and be given powers, such as fining or preventing further registrations by the group, to enforce compliance.

Ofsted welcomed the proposal, with national director for social care, Yvette Stanley, saying: The proposed powers will strengthen our ability to hold providers to account at group level. This will mean that we can secure widespread improvements for children if there are patterns of failure.”

Tackling unregistered provision

The DfE said it would also give Ofsted powers to tackle a “worrying” rise in the use of unregistered provision, particularly of children’s homes and supported accommodation.

In 2023-24, Ofsted opened cases on 1,109 potentially unregistered settings and found that 887 (87%) should have been registered (compared to 370 in 2022-23).

Under the plans, the regulator would be given powers to fine providers of unregistered provision, as an alternative to criminal prosecutions, enabling it to act more quickly against organisations.

This was also welcomed by Ofsted, with Stanley adding: “It is only right that we are given additional powers and resources to better tackle persistent offenders and put a stop to unscrupulous and profiteering providers, once and for all.”

Housing support for care leavers

The reform package also includes legislating to require all councils to provide any care leaver (up to the age of 25) whose welfare requires it with support to access and maintain accommodation, along with practical and emotional support from someone they trust.

Photo: AdobeStock/Monkey Business

This would be based on the current Staying Close programme, which the DfE is funding 47 councils to deliver in 2024-25, at a cost of £22m, and would be designed to tackle the lack of support experienced by care leavers on moving into independent living.

The plan to extend Staying Close nationwide was also proposed by the care review and set out in Stable Homes, Built on Love.

The DfE said the duty on councils would not come into force until three years after the legislation is passed, to give them sufficient time to develop the service.

Charity Become, which supports young care experienced people, said it was “a very welcome and important first step” but must not become “another postcode lottery”.

Multi-agency safeguarding teams

Outside of the care system, the government has pledged to introduce a requirement on councils to set up multi-agency child safeguarding teams, involving professionals from social care, police, health and education, and other services, where required.

They would be responsible for investigating child protection concerns and managing cases, and would be staffed by specialists from the various constituent agencies.

This adopts a recommendation from the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s 2022 report into the murders of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson.

That review found a “systemic flaw in the quality of multi-agency working”, with “an overreliance on single agency processes with superficial joint working and joint decision making”.

The panel’s proposed model of multi-agency safeguarding teams, along with the care review’s proposal for child protection cases to be held by specialist social workers, are being tested in the 10 families first for children pathfinder sites.

The DfE said the details of how the proposed teams would work would be based on the evaluation of the pathfinder, and councils and their partners would have time to prepare.

Annie Hudson, chair, Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel

In response to the plan, panel chair Annie Hudson said: “We believe that this will provide a crucial new lever for tackling some deep-seated perennial problems in safeguarding children.”

Other child protection measures

Other child protection measures include placing a duty on parents to seek local authority consent to home educate their child where the child is subject to a child protection enquiry or on a child protection plan.

The DfE also plans to introduce a unique identifier for every child, to promote better information sharing between professionals. This will be piloted before the relevant legislation is implemented.

Alongside this, it will introduce a duty that would provide “absolute clarity on the legal basis to share information for the purposes of safeguarding children”.

This is designed to tackle findings that practitioners lack confidence to share information without families’ consent when there is not clear evidence of harm, despite there being other lawful bases to do so.

Rollout of family group decision-making

Councils will also have to offer families in pre-proceedings a family group decision making (FGDM) meeting, enabling them to be involved in decisions about their children’s future, where this is in the child’s best interests.

This is based on the findings of a randomised controlled trial (RCT), commissioned by what works body Foundations, into the use of family group conferences – a particular form of FGDM – at pre-proceedings, which reported last year.

This found that children whose families were referred for a family group conference (FGC) were less likely to have had care proceedings issued (59%) compared to those not referred (72%) and were less likely to be in care one year later (36%) compared to those not referred (45%).

Photo: zinkevych/Fotolia

The DfE acknowledged that “there may be barriers for local authorities in implementing FGDM at scale, including financial constraints and challenges around the recruitment or training of staff”. But it said it hoped its ambition could be realised through investment and the sharing of best practice.

Families should be offered ‘tried and tested’ FGCs – charity

Foundations’ chief executive, Jo Casebourne, welcomed the move, adding: “This type of family-led approach helps to avoid costly, late-stage interventions, and ensures that children and families get effective support at the right time.”

The Family Rights Group (FRG), which runs an accreditation programme for family group conferences services, was also supportive, but said it was vital that families were offered FGCs.

“For this radical ambition to be achieved, the offer to families must be of a family-led, robustly evaluated approach that has been tried and tested in the UK and abroad, namely family group conferences,” said FRG chief executive Cathy Ashley.

“They operate to clear standards and reduce the likelihood of a child entering or remaining in care. For children who cannot remain at home, they enable prospective carers to be identified from within the family.”

Virtual school head role extended

The government also pledged to legislate to require councils to appoint an officer responsible for promoting the educational achievement of children on child in need plans, on child protection plans and in kinship arrangements.

This role is currently carried out on a non-statutory basis by virtual school heads, who have a statutory role to promote the educational achievement of looked-after children and provide educational advice and information in relation to former children in care.

The DfE said its proposal would “bring consistency to the deployment of the role” and “ensure that children with a social worker and those in kinship care are in school, safe and are learning”.

Payment by results scrapped for Supporting Families

In her statement to Parliament announcing the policy paper, Phillipson said the government would consolidate more than £400m of children’s social care funding within the local government finance settlement in 2025-26, to simply resourcing arrangements for councils.

As a first step, it has suspended the payment by results mechanism of the Supporting Families programme, under which families with multiple needs are provided with multi-agency support, co-ordinated by a lead practitioner, to resolve issues.

Under payment by results, most councils receive some money for the programme up front with the rest delivered based on the outcomes achieved for families.

The Association of Directors of Children’s Services welcomed the decision to scrap the approach.

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

“[It] is a hugely positive step in the right direction towards ensuring that the limited funds in the system are used in the best interest of children and families, rather than on the mechanisms of tracking and reporting on this vital work,” said ADCS president Andy Smith.