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The government will create a national agency to provide oversight of child protection practice in England, the safeguarding minister has revealed.

The Child Protection Authority (CPA) will provide “national leadership and learning on child protection and safeguarding”, with work to establish it beginning this year, Jess Phillips told the House of Commons this week.

Creating a CPA in each of England and Wales was one of the recommendations of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse’s (IICSA) final report, published in 2022.

Inquiry’s proposal for Child Protection Authority

IICSA said these should be independent statutory bodies that would be repositories of expertise on child protection and tasked with improving practice, advising governments on policy and, where necessary, inspecting institutions.

The inquiry said they would fill gaps in current arrangements by inspecting non-statutory or unregulated organisations where children spend time and multi-agency child protection arrangements.

However, the then Conservative government rejected the proposal – in relation to England – in 2023, on the grounds that many of its proposed functions were already being carried out by existing bodies. These included the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel (“the national panel”), which reviews learning from serious child protection cases.

The Welsh Government has said that the country’s existing National Independent Safeguarding Board fulfilled IICSA’s proposed remit for a CPA.

Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel remit to be expanded

In her statement to the Commons, Phillips said the CPA would initially be set up within the national panel, with work starting immediately to expand the panel’s role.

This would involve giving the panel “the resources it needs to increase its analytical capacity and its capability to develop high-quality material for practitioners”, said an accompanying Home Office report on the government’s approach to IICSA’s recommendations.

Later this year, the government will consult on the make-up and remit of the CPA, including any aspects that would require legislation. The Home Office report did not commit itself to retaining the CPA within the national panel in future or setting it up as a separate body, meaning this may be consulted upon.

Phillips told the Commons that the consultation would “take time” and not involve “upending an entire system”.

Authority ‘must help make difference to children’

The panel welcomed the plan for it to “help create the foundations for a new Child Protection Authority across England” and said it was committed to working closely with the government on this.

Its chair, Annie Hudson, said: “The panel’s oversight and work to support learning from serious incidents where children have died or been seriously harmed, inside and outside their families, provides important insight about how children can be better safeguarded and protected from all forms of abuse.

“It is important that the powers and remit of a new Child Protection Authority will help make a difference to children.”

“We are committed to working closely with government and other stakeholders as plans develop and the detailed roadmap is progressed,” she added. “It is vital that all those who work with children participate in the forthcoming consultation so together we develop a child protection system that keeps children’s needs at the heart of all decision making.”

No inspection function for Child Protection Authority

While the department said that IICSA’s recommendations would be “core to the development of the consultation”, it ruled out giving the CPA any role in inspection.

This was to ensure that agencies were “transparent about failings” with the CPA to enable it to “provide expert advice on how to improve and change”, an approach that could be impeded by giving it inspection powers.

The Home Office also highlighted findings from IICSA and other organisations that inspectorates had “failed to identify abuse taking place in institutions”.

Joint inspection on CSA within families

In relation to inspection, it said it Ofsted, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and the police and probation inspectorates would carry out a joint targeted area inspection (JTAI) of agencies’ response to child sexual abuse in family settings in autumn 2025.

The Home Office also pledged to create a cross-government working group to look at improving single and joint inspection of child protection and post-inspection accountability arrangements, to ensure areas acted on recommendations.

IICSA also recommended that the government appoint a cabinet-level minister for children to provide a sharper focus across government on
issues affecting them.

The Home Office said the government would not be implementing this specific recommendation, with the education secretary – currently, Bridget Phillipson – remaining the cabinet minister responsible for children’s issues.

Cross-government child protection board

However, it said that a “keeping children safe” ministerial board, including all ministers with roles affecting children, would be set up to support cross-government working on safeguarding. Its role would include:

• Monitoring delivery of the CPA and taking advice from it, on government policy on child protection, once it had been established.
• Tracking progress on the implementation of national panel reports, including its 2024 review of intrafamilial child sexual abuse (CSA). This found that children were too often ignored or disbelieved by practitioners, who lacked the knowledge, skills and confidence to combat this form of abuse.
• Overseeing the work to strengthen multi-agency child protection inspection.

Plan for mandatory reporting of CSA

The government has already pledged to implement one of IICSA’s key recommendations, the introduction of mandatory reporting of CSA by those in position of trust over children where they have received a disclosure of, or witnessed, abuse.

This will be introduced through the Crime and Policing Bill. However, the government has departed from the inquiry’s recommendations in two key respects:

• There will be no criminal sanction for failing to report CSA in line with the duty. Instead, such a failure would constitute “relevant conduct” that would be liable to have the person being included on the Disclosure and Barring Service’s list of people barred from working with children.
• There will be no requirement to report CSA based on the reporter witnessing recognised signs of the abuse, such as sexually harmful behaviour, physical signs of abuse or consequences of sexual abuse, such as pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases.

Specialist therapy for victims and survivors

IICSA also recommended that victims and survivors of CSA be given a guarantee of specialist therapeutic support.

In relation to this, the Home Office said it would “work on ambitious proposals for improving the therapeutic support offer”, setting out details in the forthcoming spending review, which will set government expenditure limits from 2026-29.

It also pledged to double annual funding this year for national services supporting adult survivors of CSA.

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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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The government has committed £25m to boosting foster care recruitment and support in England from 2026-28.

The money was announced in the government’s spring statement last month, when the Treasury said it would be used to recruit a further 400 fostering households.

Further details were provided last week by children’s minister Janet Daby, in response to a written parliamentary question from Liberal Democrat MP Tom Gordon.

Daby said the money would be available over two years – 2026-27 and 2027-28 – and was also designed to fund peer to peer support for foster carers, as well as bolster recruitment.

The funding builds on £36m allocated from 2023-25 by the previous government and £15m for 2025-26 provided by the current administration to tackle shortages in England’s fostering capacity. There was a 10% drop from 2021-24 in the number of mainstream foster carers – a category that excludes kinship carers approved to look after specific children.

Investment in regional fostering schemes

The investment to date has been designed to roll out regional fostering recruitment and retention programmes, set up by clusters of local authorities. These comprise three elements:

1. A fostering recruitment support hub, providing an information and support service to help prospective carers from their initial enquiry to making an application.
2. A communications campaign to drive interest in fostering across the region and increase the number of enquiries received by the hub.
3. Expanding the ‘Mockingbird model’, developed by the Fostering Network in the UK, under which “constellations” of fostering households provide mutual support to one another, led by an experienced carer who provides a ‘hub home’ for the others. A 2020 evaluation of the scheme for the DfE found that households who participated in Mockingbird were 82% less likely to deregister than households who did not.

In her answer to Gordon, Daby did not confirm whether the £25m for 2026-28 would provide further funding for these regional programmes or a different purpose.

Foster carers ‘lack authority to take decisions’

Alongside the increased investment, the DfE is also planning to enable foster carers to take more day-to-day decisions about children in their care.

Currently, a child’s placement plan must set out where authority to make decisions has been delegated from parents and councils, where they share parental responsibility, to carers, in relation to matters including healthcare, education, leisure, home life, faith and social media use.

Statutory guidance states that foster carers should have delegated authority in relation to day-to-day parenting decisions, but the Fostering Network has warned that this is not borne out in practice.

The charity worked with Green MP Ellie Chowns to table an amendment to the current Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to give foster carers delegated authority over these decisions by default.

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Nominate your colleague or social work inspiration by filling in our nominations form with a few paragraphs (100-250 words) explaining how and why the person has inspired you.

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Pledge to reform delegated authority rules

Though this was not accepted by the government, it has pledged to consult on amending the Care Planning, Placement and Case Review (England) Regulations 2010, which set out the current rules around delegated authority, to achieve the same result.

In her response to Gordon, Daby said: “The department has also begun conversations with the sector about proposed changes to delegated authority, ensuring that all foster carers have delegated authority by default in relation to day-to-day parenting of the child in their care.”

The minister added that the DfE was “committed to improving practice and guidance” in relation to the handling of allegations against foster carers, which she said was “a key contributor to high levels of…deregistration”, but did not set out further details.

Fostering body urges greater focus on retention

Daby’s statement came as fostering information service Foster Wiki released a report about carer recruitment and retention, based on analysis of data and its research with carers.

While praising the DfE’s investment in regional recruitment hubs as “a crucial and commendable step” in addressing fostering’s workforce challenges, it called for a sharper focus on retention to prevent experienced carers from leaving the sector.

This should include greater professional recognition of foster carers, backed by ongoing training and nationally recognised qualifications, a remuneration system based on skills, specialism and experience, and an independently managed allegations process, with representation and advocacy for carers.

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Strike action is looming over local government pay in Scotland after union members declared their readiness to walk out over employers’ 3% pay offer for 2025-26.

Consultative ballots by UNISON and the GMB revealed that over 90% of participants would back strike action if employers’ body COSLA did not improve the offer, which was made in February and immediately rejected by union leaders.

Member of the third local government union – Unite – also rejected the pay offer in a consultative ballot.

The offer  is just above the rate of inflation in February (2.8%) according to the government’s preferred consumer prices index (CPI) measure.

However, it is below the broader CPIH rate (3.7%), which also includes owner occupiers’ housing costs, while the Bank of England predicted  in February that the CPI rate would rise to 3.7% over the coming months before falling during the rest of the year.

That projection is clouded in uncertainty due to doubts over the impact of US president Donald Trump’s tariffs on the global economy.

Offer is less than half of unions’ claim

The unions had lodged a claim for 6.5%, which they said was designed to tackle “severe erosion of pay” in local government in Scotland over many years.

For UNISON – 92% of whose voting members backed taking strike action in the consultative ballot – local government committee chair Colette Hunter said: “The last thing anyone wants to do is take strike action.

“But local government workers deserve a fair increase to stop their pay lagging behind inflation and other sectors of the economy.

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Union members’ vote ‘should be wake-up call’ for employers

“This result should be a wake-up call for COSLA. It needs to reward council workers fairly for the essential services they provide and start to reverse years of pay cuts.”

The GMB said 96% of voting members backed a walkout were COSLA’s offer not improved.

“The offer is clearly unacceptable and nowhere close to matching the commitment of council workers, adding pennies to the hourly rate paid to the lowest-paid staff,” said Keir Greenaway, the union’s senior organiser in the public sector.

Both unions warned that a formal ballot for industrial action would follow without improvements in COSLA’s offer.

COSLA warns of ‘damaging strikes in pursuit of unsustainable pay’

However, in response, a COSLA spokesperson said: “Our current offer, which was made before the settlement date, and remains on the table, fully utilises the available funding and represents a balance between making an offer aligned with the current CPI rate of inflation and protecting services and jobs.

“We must be clear that the current offer is not without challenges for councils struggling to balance budgets.

“We implore our unions to properly consult their members on pay offers rather than immediately seeking to escalate to damaging industrial action in pursuit of unsustainable levels of pay that would result in cuts to services and higher taxes.”

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Ofsted has sharpened its focus on stability for children in care in its judgments of social care providers, particularly children’s homes and independent fostering agencies.

The changes to its social care common inspection framework (SCCIF) are a response to concerns that some providers are rejecting referrals for children with complex needs due to concerns about the impact on their Ofsted ratings.

As a result, those children are being placed far from family or friends, experiencing multiple moves or ending up in unsuitable or unregistered accommodation.

Ratings concerns ‘driving rejection of children with complex needs’

Research for the regulator published last year found that 60% of local authorities believed these concerns were often or always a reason that homes rejected referrals for children with complex needs.

By contrast, 60% of children’s home providers said concerns about the impact of a child with complex needs on their rating were never or rarely a reason for rejecting a referral.

At the time of the research’s publication, Ofsted said there was almost no difference between SCCIF grades for homes that care for children with complex needs and those for all homes, with about four in five judged good or outstanding.

This reflected the fact that the SCCIF “was designed to focus on children’s progress and experiences, as opposed to their outcomes”, meaning inspectors should take account of children’s starting points.

However, in a blog post published last month, Ofsted’s national director for social care, Yvette Stanley, said that the perception persisted among some homes that taking on a child with more complex needs would hurt their rating.

Greater focus on stability in inspection framework

Ofsted said the changes, enacted last week, would put a sharper focus on:

• how providers promote and sustain stability for children, including those with high needs;
• how providers balance the needs of a child requiring placement with those already living in the setting;
• the timeliness of a provider’s work to prepare children for their next move;
• how accurately placement decisions reflect a provider’s statement of purpose.

“We want providers to be risk-aware, not risk-averse,” said Stanley.

“I hope these changes send a clear message that we will recognise providers who step up to support our children with complex needs, and who stick with them though the most difficult times.”

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The rise in employers’ national insurance contributions (NICs), which came into force yesterday (6 April 2025), risks causing harm to people with care needs and more strain for carers, care provider leader have warned.

Sector associations have claimed that many services face closure, leaving people without much-needed care, due to employers now paying a NICs rate of 15%, up from 13.8% previously, on employee earnings above £5,000 a year, down from £9,100.

But while public sector organisations had their increased costs covered, this was not applied to the adult social care sector, with the government successfully overturning an attempt by the House of Lords to enact such an opt-out.

Cost of almost £1bn to sector

Think-tank the Nuffield Trust has calculated that the change will cost independent care providers in England an extra £940m in 2025-26, alongside a further £1.85bn from this year’s 6.7% rise in the national living wage (NLW).

Councils should meet about £2bn of the combined £2.8bn cost, said the trust, because they purchase about 70% of care provided by the independent sector.

But while the government has claimed that English councils with adult social care responsibilities will have up to an additional £3.7bn in budget in 2025-26, approximately £1.2bn of this is dedicated to adult social care.

Council fee rises lag well behind cost increases, say providers

The Homecare Association, which represents domiciliary care providers, said that its members faced an average increase in costs of 10% in 2025-26; however, council fee increases were averaging about 5%, based on data it had collected so far.

It said that some councils had frozen fees, while others offering higher percentage rises were starting from a low base.

Last year, it reported that there was a £1bn shortfall between the fees paid by councils and NHS commissioners in England and the amount home care providers needed to pay staff at least the NLW, meet other costs and make a minimum profit or surplus.

Since then, the association’s calculation of the minimum price for home care in England has risen from £28.53 to £32.14 per hour. This is mainly due to the NICs and NLW rises, though it has also uplifted its minimum profit level from 5% to 7% of costs, based on recent research.

‘Risk of harm to individuals and strain on carers’

Commenting on the impact of the increased costs, chief executive Jane Townson said: “We are likely to see an increase in non-compliance with regulations, insolvencies and provider closures.

“This risks harm to individuals; greater burdens on unpaid carers; and more pressure on NHS services. We call on the government to provide adequate funding for vital homecare services.”

Care England chief executive Martin Green offered a similar message, saying fee increases from councils did not reflect the “enormous increases” in cost that providers were facing.

“[This] will drive some services into bankruptcy, and the impact on both people who are supported, and care staff will be catastrophic,” he added.

Bridging fund proposed to mitigate impact on providers

Meanwhile, the National Care Forum (NCF), which represents not-for-profit services, has written an open letter to chancellor Rachel Reeves suggesting a way to mitigate the impact of the NICs rise on providers and prepare the sector for the government’s planned fair pay agreement.

It urged the Reeves to set up a “bridging fund”, equivalent to at least the sector’s losses from the NICs rise, to enable employers to make the transition to the fair pay agreement.

Under this, an Adult Social Care Negotiating Body would be created, to make agreements about the pay, terms and conditions of adult social care workers in England, in a move designed to raise salaries across the sector.

The bridging fund – an idea conceived of by NCF member Methodist Homes – would be allocated based on an organisation’s number of employees and could be paid direct to providers or administered by local authorities, the open letter said.

‘Not too late for government to step in to safeguard services’

NCF policy director Liz Jones said it was “not too late” for the government to address the impact of the employer NICs rise on people who needed care and support.

She added: “Without action, we are concerned that hundreds of thousands of people with learning disabilities, autistic people and older people, as well as their wider communities, will not be able to access the vital services they need to live fulfilling lives as a result of the predicted shrinkage of care and support services resulting from these measures.”

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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.

The watchdog that monitors Social Work England has written to cabinet ministers to raise concerns over chronic delays to fitness to practise (FtP) cases.

In its latest report on the regulator, covering 2024, the Professional Standards Authority (PSA) said Social Work England had failed to meet its standard on the fairness and efficiency of its FTP system, for the third year running. The regulator met all 17 of the PSA’s other standards, in a generally positive review.

Social Work England did not meet the remaining standard (standard 15) because of ongoing delays in completing FTP cases, with no improvement in timeliness during 2024, said the PSA.

Concerns escalated to cabinet ministers

As a result, PSA chair Caroline Corby has written to education secretary Bridget Phillipson and health and social care secretary Wes Streeting to raise its concerns about the situation with them.

While she acknowledged that Social Work England was “taking steps to improve its processes and learn from the delays”, this had not generated improvements.

In separate letters, Corby set out the consequences of the issue to Phillipson and Streeting: “Every stakeholder that we met with for our 2023-24 performance review, and most stakeholders that provided us with written feedback, raised their concerns about this issue.

“For registrants, fitness to practise delays can have a significant impact on their wellbeing and cause financial hardship. For people raising concerns with Social Work England, these delays can mean they are waiting years for a resolution to their concern, which can be particularly difficult where the alleged conduct has had a significant impact on their life.”

Delays at all stages of fitness to practise process

Latest figures show significant delays at all stages of Social Work England’s FTP process:

• Triage: Cases that completed the triage stage in October to December 2024 took an average of 35 weeks to do so, compared with 28 weeks in July to September and 22 weeks in April to June last year. At triage, Social Work England staff determine whether the concerns about the social worker merit investigation.
• Investigation: While the average age of cases that completed the investigations process has fallen steadily, from 68 weeks in January to March 2024 to 60 weeks in October to December last year, the average age of remaining cases rose from 62 to 74 weeks over this time. This compares to a quarterly target of 56 weeks for October to December 2024.
• Case examiner: During October to December 2024, cases took an average of 13 weeks to complete the case examiner process, the same as in the previous quarter and just above the target of 12 weeks. At this stage, pairs of examiners review the investigation report to determine whether the concerns about the social worker could realistically be proved and, if so, whether their fitness to practise could be found to be impaired.
• Final hearings: Social Work England held just five final hearings in October to December 2024, down from 13 in the previous two quarters, and from 64 in April to June 2023. The number of open cases at the hearings stage rose from 386 as of June 2024 to 421 at the end of last year.

Causes of delay 

The causes of the delays are multiple, including the regulator receiving higher than expected numbers of FTP concerns since its inception in 2019 and having cases delayed by family court proceedings.

More recently, it has struggled to adequately staff its triage and investigations teams and has had to reduce the number of hearings it holds due to lack of budget.

The PSA cited action that Social Work England had taken in response, including piloting having two-person, rather than three-person, panels, to increase capacity to conclude more hearings, and reviewing adjournments in hearings to identify opportunities to prevent future breaks in proceedings.

The regulator was also providing more support to investigators to help them progress their most complex cases, while having case examiners share learning with investigators to prevent adjournments being necessary at the case examiner stage, said the PSA.

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Performance ‘comparable to worst performing regulators’

However, the watchdog, which also oversees nine health professional regulators, stressed that these actions had not led to improvements in the timeliness of cases, where Social Work England’s performance was currently “comparable to the worst performing regulators in this area”.

In its report, the PSA referenced a joint statement made by the British Association of Social Workers (BASW), Social Workers Union (SWU) and UNISON in May 2025 raising concerns about the impact of FTP delays on the social workers concerned.

In response to the PSA report, SWU general secretary John McGowan said: “It has been almost a year since SWU, BASW, and UNISON jointly wrote to Social Work England to express our deep concerns about the regulator’s ongoing and increasing delays in processing fitness to practise cases.

“Since that time, the PSA has concluded that Social Work England has not improved performance in this area, its hearing stage backlog has continued to grow, and many people are rightly still raising concerns about how long the process is taking.

Social workers ‘experiencing stress beyond belief’

“The 421 social workers in England with open cases at the end of 2024 deserve better support than this and it is a shame that the regulator has been classified by PSA as ‘comparable to the worst performing regulators in this area’.

“No matter the outcome of their cases these social workers are experiencing stress beyond belief.

“I hope this report convinces Social Work England to continue with their engagement with the four asks in our joint letter to improve their fitness to practises process.”

These were: ensuring investigations were more “collaborative and thorough”; providing case examiners with updated guidance and training, to help them take account of contextual factors in their decisions; developing alternative outcomes for social workers who have been awaiting a hearing for years, and adopting a “more reasonable approach” to the voluntary removal of social workers subject to FTP processes from the register.

Social Work England ‘has plans for improvement’

Giving the regulator’s response to the PSA report, Social Work England chief executive Colum Conway said: “While timeliness in our fitness to practise process continues to be a challenge, we do have a pathway to achieving standard 15 which requires additional funding over time.

“The delays in case progression are unacceptable for us and for everyone involved.”

A spokesperson for the regulator added: “Plans and actions are already in place for improvement, and more details will be published in our business plan for 2025 to 2026.”

Fee rise ‘should enable more resource for fitness to practise’

In relation to increasing funding, Corby told Phillipson and Streeting that Social Work England’s proposed 33% increase in practitioner fees from September “should enable it to devote more resources to fitness to practise”.

The Social Work England spokesperson said that “the additional income from any potential fee increases would support us to deliver all our regulatory objectives and goals with a focus on improving timeliness in our fitness to practise process”.

However, McGowan warned that SWU members were concerned that the regulator was “now considering passing the cost of improvement attempts along to social workers – a workforce already strained by over a decade of budget cuts, ongoing recruitment and retention issues, and the cost-of-living crisis”.

The fee increase will only boost Social Work England’s overall level of income if it is not offset by reductions in DfE grant.

Shifting balance of income from government to social worker

Social Work England’s justification for the increase is to shift the balance of income it receives towards social workers and away from the DfE, whose share rose from 52% to 57% from 2020-21 to 2023-24 to help the regulator deal with rising fitness to practise costs.

The spokesperson added: “Our budget is overseen by the Department for Education and is typically agreed annually, including the level of grant in aid, with no capacity to hold funds in reserve over multiple years.

“We continue to work with our sponsor, the Department for Education, to review our overall resourcing needs. We anticipate that our overall level of income will continue to be determined in this way.”

Social Work England will not review a sample of practitioners’ continuing professional development (CPD) records following the three-month registration renewal period for the second year running.

While practitioners will face the same CPD requirements during the 2025 renewal round as previously – submitting two pieces of learning, one of which must have been reflected upon with a peer – the regulator will not check any individual records to verify compliance with its professional standard on CPD.

This is because of an ongoing review of its CPD model, which will lead to a consultation on reforming its approach that will take place in 2026-27.

Checks on sample of social workers’ records

Following each of the renewal rounds from 2020-23, independent assessors appointed by Social Work England sampled 2.5% of practitioners’ CPD submissions.

After the introduction of the current CPD model, in 2022, assessors were tasked with checking whether:

• There was a clear description in at least one piece of CPD of the impact of the activity on the social worker’s practice.
• The social worker had discussed at least one piece of CPD with a peer.

When both requirements were met, the social worker’s CPD was approved. If at least one was not, their record was reviewed, independently, by a second assessor.

If that assessor also did not approve the record, the social worker was flagged to have their CPD reviewed the following year and was sent the first assessor’s feedback.

CPD review process dropped for 2024 renewal process

Social Work England dropped the process of sampling 2.5% of social workers’ records for the 2024 renewal round because it wanted to review its CPD process. Only 57 practitioners whose submissions were flagged up following the 2023 audit had their records checked after the 2024 process.

At the same time, the regulator launched a survey of social workers’ and others’ views of the CPD process. This was part of an evidence-gathering exercise designed to help it understand how practitioners recorded their learning, their feelings on the current requirements and the impact of the system on practice.

It also carried out two workshops with social workers, reviewed a sample of anonymised CPD records, did a literature review of research into the purpose and impact of CPD, and carried out a desk-based review of its and other regulators’ messaging about CPD.

A paper to Social Work England’s March board meeting set out some of the conclusions from this exercise.

Social workers ‘recording CPD purely to meet renewal threshold’

These included that:

• Social workers were completing CPD submissions with “rigour and detail” on a wide variety of topics, with safeguarding being the most common focus.
• Most social workers only recorded the required two pieces each year, “indicating they are recording CPD…purely to meet the CPD threshold for renewal”.
• Entries tended to be submitted during the renewal period suggesting they were not being completed at the time the CPD activity was undertaken. “This calls into question the quality of the reflection and its ability to drive up quality in practice,” Social Work England said.
• Social workers saw CPD as essential to their professional development, but “[advocated] for a longer CPD cycle to ease the burden of recording CPD”.
• However, some felt the requirement to “only” record two pieces of CPD demonstrated that Social Work England did “not value the breadth of CPD a social worker does throughout the year” or saw it as being directly linked to registration renewal.
• Some social workers said they did not always feel supported by their employer to complete CPD and called for a greater role for employers in managing and monitoring CPD.
• Social Work England’s online platform did not appear to be a barrier to recording.

Consultation on reforming CPD

On the back of the findings, Social Work England said it wanted to use the 2025-26 financial year to carry out further evidence gathering where there were currently gaps and develop proposals for CPD reform that would be consulted upon in 2026-27.

It said the consultation was likely to be preceded by engagement with the sector, regulators and its National Advisory Forum, which comprises experts by experience and social workers and acts as a “critical friend” to Social Work England.

A spokesperson added: “Whilst we consider any longer-term changes to our CPD model, individual CPD records will not be selected for review. However, we will continue to conduct system checks and monitor the quality of CPD to ensure compliance with our CPD requirements.”

Following the 2024 renewal round, these checks included ensuring that social workers did not submit two identical CPD records.

Celebrate those who’ve inspired you

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Do you have a colleague, mentor, or social work figure you can’t help but gush about?

Our My Brilliant Colleague series invites you to celebrate anyone within social work who has inspired you – whether current or former colleagues, managers, students, lecturers, mentors or prominent past or present sector figures whom you have admired from afar.

Nominate your colleague or social work inspiration by filling in our nominations form with a few paragraphs (100-250 words) explaining how and why the person has inspired you.

*Please note that, despite the need to provide your name and role, you or the nominee can be anonymous in the published entry*

If you have any questions, email our community journalist, Anastasia Koutsounia, at anastasia.koutsounia@markallengroup.com

Review of registration renewal

In tandem with the first phase of its work on the future of CPD, Social Work England also reviewed its annual registration renewal process.

According to the same board report, this review found that:

• The sector accepted an annual renewal cycle and agreed that it supported public protection, Social Work England’s overarching objective. The regulator concluded that retaining this would “maintain regulatory oversight [and] compliance with CPD, and continue to promote public protection”.
• The timing of the renewals window – 1 September to 30 November – provided social workers with sufficient time to complete the three required actions: paying their fee, completing the renewal form and submitting their CPD.
• Social workers were “confident and familiar with the annual registration renewal process and the actions required to successfully renew their annual registration”.
• Most social workers found the online renewal form “intuitive”, with “a very few encountering user issues with the system”.
• Social workers agreed that the online journey was “accessible and easy to navigate”, and felt that the regulator provided “sufficient
  support, guidance and communication to enable compliance with registration renewal”.

Current renewal system to stay in place

On the back of the findings, Social Work England said the current system would stay in place, though it was developing plans to make “incremental” improvements to operational effectiveness and engagement with the sector.

The regulator confirmed that for the upcoming registration renewal period (1 September to 30 November 2025), social workers  would still be required to:

• submit a registration renewal form;
• pay the registration fee;
• record a minimum of two different pieces of continuing professional development, one of which must include a peer reflection.

There will be no criminal sanction for failing to report child sexual abuse (CSA) under the government’s plan to introduce mandatory reporting, despite home secretary Yvette Cooper appearing to have said previously that there would be.

Instead, the government has said that those under a duty to report “may be referred to their professional regulator (where applicable) or the Disclosure and Barring Service [DBS], who will consider their suitability to continue working in regulated activity with children”.

It will also introduce an offence of of preventing or deterring a person from complying with their duty to report CSA.

The proposals, included in the Crime and Policing Bill, are broadly similar to those put forward by the previous Conservative government before it lost power last year.

Response to CSA inquiry recommendation

Both sets of proposals are responses to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse’s (IICSA) recommendation to require anyone carrying out a regulated activity – those which a person barred by the DBS are prohibited from doing – or in a position of trust with children to report cases of CSA.

However, both the Conservative and Labour proposals differ from IICSA’s in two key respects:

• There would be no requirement to report CSA in cases where recognised indicators of abuse were present. Instead, the duty would only apply where a person had witnessed CSA or a perpetrator or victim had disclosed it to them, which the inquiry found or implied were relatively rare.
• There would be no criminal sanction for anyone who did not report cases of witnessed or disclosed abuse. In relation to this, IICSA said that a failure by those in a position of trust over children to pass on information about CSA to the police or local authorities was “inexcusable” and “the sanction for such an omission should be commensurate”.

Cooper comments interpreted as heralding criminal sanction

The absence of an offence comes despite Cooper having said, on announcing that Labour would take forward mandatory reporting, that there would be “professional and criminal sanctions to fail to report or cover up child sexual abuse”.

This was taken as meaning that failing to report CSA, if you were under a duty to do so, would be criminalised.

For example, the House of Commons Library, which provides neutral briefings on parliamentary issues, drew a contrast between the Conservative and Labour approaches in a report on the issue, published in January this year.

“On 6 January 2025, the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, announced the government would “make it mandatory to report abuse” through measures in the Crime and Policing Bill, to be introduced to Parliament in the spring,” it said.

“She added that failing to report child sexual abuse would be “an offence, with professional and criminal sanctions”. This is different from the previous government’s proposals for mandatory reporting, under which failing to report would not have been an offence.”

No offence of failing to report CSA

However, when the Crime and Policing Bill was published at the end of February, there was no such offence included.

The bill is now being scrutinised by a committee of MPs, who considered the issue last week, when Labour MP Matt Bishop raised the absence of an offence with crime and policing minister Diana Johnson.

In response, Johnson pointed to the fact that those subject to the duty would include volunteers and taxi drivers taking children to school, as well as professionals such as social workers and teachers.

She said IICSA’s recommendations “were not about criminalising those individuals”, which the government did not believe would be “appropriate”.

“What we were very clear about – again, I think that [IICSA] made this point – is that if anybody tries to interfere with or stop that reporting, that is the criminal offence,” she added. “That is the bit that we think is important to have in the bill.”

Pressure group Mandate Now was heavily critical of both the absence of a criminal sanction and the fact that the duty to report applied only to witnessed or disclosed abuse, given research indicating such cases were rare.

‘Never acceptable to turn blind eye to abuse’

For the NSPCC, head of policy Anna Edmundson said: “It is never acceptable for adults to turn a blind eye to child sexual abuse and essential they act immediately if they have any concerns that children or young people may be experiencing it.”

She said that the “responsibility to report must be underpinned by adequate training”, so professionals and volunteers can “spot the potential signs and indicators of child sexual abuse and respond with confidence”.

“There should be consequences for failing to act in line with clearly established duties to report – including a range of professional and other disciplinary sanctions,” she added.

Legislation ‘a step in the right direction’

Lucy Duckworth, policy advisor at The Survivors Trust, said the legislation, though not going as far as the charity would have liked, was a “fantastic step in the right direction”, in the context of a longstanding campaign to introduce mandatory reporting.

She said criminal sanctions for failure to report would not be effective because “people wouldn’t believe it would happen”.

“The criminal justice system is not fit for purpose,” she added. “What people are concerned about is their reputations. If that position of trust is threatened if people fail to report and you could lose your job, [that will have an impact].”

Duckworth said that though the trust – a membership body for specialist rape and sexual abuse services – would have liked to have seen a duty to report CSA when there were recognised signs of abuse, the Home Office’s view was that “we don’t have a culture where we understand what indicators of abuse look like”.