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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.

Government departments and public bodies are to be placed under a duty to promote life chances for children in care and care leavers in England, the Department for Education (DfE) has revealed.

They would be placed under a “corporate parenting duty”, through government amendments to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, ministers’ legislative vehicle for reforming children’s social care.

What corporate parenting duty involves

The duty, tabled by education secretary Bridget Phillipson, would require agencies, when exercising their functions, to

• be alert to matters which adversely affect, or might adversely  affect, the wellbeing of looked-after children and care leavers (aged up to 25);
• assess what services or support they provide are or may be available for looked-after children and care leavers;
• seek to provide opportunities for looked-after children and care leavers to participate in activities designed to promote their wellbeing or enhance their employment prospects;
• take such action as they consider appropriate to help looked-after children and care leavers make use of services and access support, that they provide and access opportunities to promote their wellbeing or enhance their employment prospects.

Scope of duty

The duty would apply to all government departments, generally in relation to their functions in England, Ofsted, English schools and colleges, NHS bodies in England, the Youth Justice Board and the Care Quality Commission.

The relevant departments and agencies would be required to co-operate with each other, and with local authorities, in exercising the duty where they considered that doing so would safeguard or promote the wellbeing of looked-after children or care leavers.

They would also have to have regard to any guidance published by the DfE on the corporate parenting duty, while the department would have to publish a report every three years on its own exercise of the duty.

The provision would not apply to the government’s immigration and asylum functions, while departments and agencies would only have to exercise the duty to the extent that it was consistent with the proper exercise of its functions and was reasonably practicable.

The amendments will be debated when the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill returns to the House of Commons next week, but are certain to be passed because of the government’s large majority.

Existing council corporate parenting responsibilities

The new duty would complement the existing corporate parenting duty on councils, under section 1 of the Children and Social Work Act 2017. This requires them, in the exercise of their functions in relation to looked-after children and care leavers, to have regard to the need:

• to act in their best interests, and promote their physical and mental health and wellbeing;
• to encourage them to express their views, wishes and feelings;
• to take into account their views, wishes and feelings;
• to help them gain access to, and make the best use of, services provided by authorities and their relevant partners;
• to promote high aspirations, and seek to secure the best outcomes, for the children and young people;
• for children and young people to be safe, and for stability in their home lives, relationships and education or work;
• to prepare those children and young people for adulthood and independent living.

The plan to introduce the duty was referenced in a children’s social care policy paper, published in November 2024, but not included in the original text of the bill.

This prompted criticism from organisations including the Association of Directors of Children’s Services and children’s charity Become.

Support for children in care ‘can’t end with local authority’

Become welcomed the proposed duty, with chief executive Katharine Sacks-Jones saying: “For children in care to thrive support can’t end with their local authority.

“Health, welfare, education and other services play a huge role in their lives and can shape their futures. We welcome this much needed step to ensure more public bodies take responsibility for supporting young people to live happy and healthy lives.”

However, the charity said it would be studying the proposals to see how they could be strengthened.

“Substantial work” is needed to improve the recording and reporting of data on family group conferences (FGCs,) ahead of an expected increase in their use on the back of government legislation.

That was among the conclusions of a study commissioned by Department for Education-funded evidence body Foundations into council approaches to collecting and analysing data on FGCs.

It comes with the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill set to introduce a duty for councils to offer families a family group decision making (FGDM) meeting – an umbrella term for FGC-style provision – when they are considering issuing care proceedings.

On the back of the research, published this week, Foundations has commissioned charities Coram and the Family Rights Group (FRG) to collect data from councils, on a voluntary basis, on access to, and take up of, FGCs, as part of wider research.

Impact of FGCs on preventing children going into care

In a children’s services context, FGCs are family-led meetings, organised by a practitioner (the FGC co-ordinator), giving extended families the opportunity to make plans for children where there are concerns about their safety and wellbeing. They are generally in-house council services, though some authorities outsource the function.

Previous Foundations-commissioned research, published in 2023, found children whose families were referred to an FGC at the pre-proceedings stage were significantly less likely to be in care 12 months later than those whose families were not so referred.

The finding is one of the key factors behind the government’s planned duty, which is likely to lead to a significant increase in the use of FGCs.

‘Very little information’ on how councils record FGC data

The 2023 study found that, though the vast majority of English councils offered FGCs at the pre-proceedings stage, there was “very little information on what or how local authorities recorded or reported on [them]” and no routinely collected data on the extent to which they were offered and taken up.

As a result, it was not possible to know who was receiving the service and what their outcomes were.

The latest study, produced by Coram, the FRG, FGC provider Daybreak and sector data organisation Data 2 Insight, was designed to understand what data councils collected on FGCs, particularly  at pre-proceedings, the enablers and barriers to them collecting and reporting on data and how a national data collection may be developed.

It involved in-depth site visits to three councils, interviews with staff from 10 other authorities, two parent-carer discussions and analysis of previous work on FGC data collection.

‘Substantial work’ needed on improving data

The study concluded that “substantial work” was needed to improve both the recording and reporting of FGC data by councils.

Councils recorded a range of data, including on referrals, the planning of FGCs, conference meetings, including attendance, FGC plans and reviews and feedback from families and professionals at closure, including views on outcomes.

In some areas, almost all FGC information was recorded on the children’s social care case management system (CMS), often in a specific microsite, while in others, only limited information was stored on CMS, meaning they used spreadsheets “extensively”.

There were advantages and disadvantages to each approach, the study said. While services that predominantly used spreadsheets were able to create and adapt these easily to capture all the information they required, “data entry was manual and therefore required significant capacity”, the report said.

But while services that relied more on CMS required less manual data entry, it was difficult for them to customise FGC data collection, meaning they did not record all of the information they wanted. Also, CMS were much more difficult to adapt and change than spreadsheets, with FGC services sometimes waiting years for changes.

Variation in data quality

There was “substantial variation in the quality of FGC data and in data quality assurance processes”, the report said.

Some services were “quite limited” in what they did to quality assure their data, while others did regular audits of FGC data on their CMS to check for errors or inconsistencies.

Challenges for councils included recording FGC data for each child within a family where they each had separate records on the CMS, and situations when the child was not known to children’s social care and so was not on the CMS. The latter situation tended to result in data being saved outside the case management system.

Data reporting was largely focused on workflow and outputs, such as the number and origins of referrals, the proportion of referrals that resulted in an FGC, the number of FGC meetings and plans completed and details of who attended.

Limited analysis of equity of provision

While services often looked at why families did not take up an FGC, most did not carry out detailed analysis of the factors influencing refusal, such as the characteristics of the family and the point at which a conference were offered.

No council studied looked at equity of access or provision of an FGC, for example, based on the legal status of the child or family demographics compared to the wider population, mainly because of the lack of population-wide data.

“As a result, services were limited in their ability to look at access, especially in terms of equity, diversity, and inclusion,” the research report said.

There was also “limited data” reported on the content of FGC plans, other than to report that the plan had been agreed, sent to families and uploaded onto the CMS.

Lack of reporting on outcomes

While some services reported on satisfaction children’s families’ and professionals’ satisfaction with FGCs, this was stymied by low response rates to feedback, while there was a lack of reporting  on outcomes or impact because of difficulties measuring these.

And though some services looked at measures such as the legal status or living arrangements of the child six or 12 months after an FGC, most acknowledged that it was difficult to attribute these outcomes to an FGC given the many other factors that could have contributed.

FGC service representatives interviewed generally wanted a national data collection to provide benchmarking information, including to measure the impact they were having on social care outcomes for children and any potential cost savings.

However, they raised concerns about how this would work, including because of the differences in FGC services between areas and the difficulties in measuring outcomes.

Creating a national data collection

The study recommended a phased approach to creating a national data collection, which should be co-designed with the sector, account for variations between services and minimise burdens on local authorities.

It said this should start with a voluntary survey of councils to collect aggregated data, without details about individual children or families, which could pave the way for a national data collection of child-level information.

This is being taken forward by Foundations, as part of research it has commissioned from Coram and FRG on how FGCs are offered to families in England and the factors influencing their decision to accept or reject the offer.

National survey of local authorities

Coram and FRG are carrying out a voluntary survey of councils, which covers:

• What an FGC looks like in their area, the process is for making referrals, the number of children that were subject to an FGC referral in 2023-24 and information about them.
• The process around how FGCs are offered to parent/carers, the number of FGCs consented to in 2023-24, the number children in these cases and information about these children.
• The number of FGCs that took place in 2023-24, the number of children involved and information about the children, along with the the number of FGCs that did not take place in 2023-24 and reasons for this.

Data is being collected via an excel template, which can be obtained by emailing Impactandevaluation@coram.org.uk.

The deadline for the data collection is Friday 4 April 2025 and returns should be emailed to Impactandevaluation@coram.org.uk.

Data collection ‘critical’ for ensuring success of policy

Foundations chief executive Jo Casebourne said the collection would “build a clearer picture of what is happening with FGCs across the country and support local authorities to ensure that they are not only accessible but also make a real difference for families and children”.

FRG chief executive Cathy Ashley stressed that the new research was “critical for ensuring the new national family group decision making offer and future policy changes will have real, lasting impact”.

Record numbers of children’s social workers are in post in England but there has been a fall in the number holding cases, Department for Education (DfE) figures have revealed.

There was an increase of about 1,200 full-time equivalent (FTE) social workers employed in council children’s services in the year to September 2024, with numbers rising by 3.7% to 34,328.2, the highest figure in a data series that started in 2017.

However, the data, which covers registered social workers apart from the director of children’s services, revealed that there had been a fall in the number of practitioners holding cases in 2023-24, with four in ten now not being case holders.

At the same time, the FTE vacancy rate – which hit a high of September 20% in 2022 – fell from 18.9% to 17.3%, with the number of full-time equivalent vacancies dropping by just over 500 (6.9%), to 7,188.6.

The proportion of FTE agency social workers in the workforce also fell, from 17.9% to 16.2%, with their number dropping by over 650 (9.2%), to 6,520.7, a trend attributed in part to authorities preparing for the introduction of rules restricting their use in local authority children’s services.

Improvement in retention

Fewer FTE social workers left their posts in the year to September 2024 (5,254.6) than over the previous 12 months (4,728.7), bringing the turnover rate down from 15.9% to 13.8%, the lowest proportion since 2019-20.

Provisional DfE data suggests that 61% of these leavers – about 2,868.1 FTE staff or 8.4% of the workforce – left local authority children’s social work altogether in 2023-24. In 2022-23, 3,028.3 staff (9.1% of the then workforce) left the sector.

Of other leavers in 2023-24, 27% (1,275.1 FTE staff) moved between children’s services authorities and 12% (585.5) took up an agency post in the sector.

As in previous years, staff with less than two years’ service in their current local authority made up the largest group by time spent with their employer, with their percentage increasing from 30.9% to 31.4% (10,786.7).

The proportion of those with between two and five years’ service fell, from 26.8% to 25%.

Recruitment levels

The number of new starters dropped by just over 400 FTE staff from 2022-23 to 2023-24, reflecting the fact that no one graduated from the biennial Step Up to Social Work programme during the latter period.

However, at 5,613.4 FTE posts, the number of starters was higher than in any previous non-Step Up year, which the DfE suggested reflected the fact that record numbers of people (650) qualified through social work apprenticeships in 2023-24.

The figures also revealed that the average FTE children’s social worker was off sick for 3.4% of their working time in 2023-24, up from 3.2% in 2022-23.

Workforce demographics 

The number of FTE social workers grew in every age group, with the largest increase (of about 550 staff) being in the 40-49 segment. Staff aged 30-39 continued to be the largest group, accounting for 30.1% of the workforce, followed by the 40-49 group, which constituted 26.3% of the total.

The proportion of female staff was similar to that in 2023 (87.5%, compared with 87.4%), while the percentage of FTE social workers from ethnic minority groups (excluding white minorities) grew from 25.3% to 26.9%.

This was driven, chiefly, by the growth in the proportion of black staff, from 14.7% to 15.7%, between 2023 and 2024.

Caseload average hits record low 

According to the DfE’s measure of average caseloads, these hit a record low of 15.4 in September 2024, down from 16.0 a year earlier.

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.

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, in 2023-24, the key factor was a drop in the number of cases held by social workers.

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

Fall in number of case-holding practitioners

From September 2023 to September 2024, the number of case-holding social workers fell by 1.5%, from about 21,111.4 to 20,803.5 FTE staff.

This means the proportion of case holders in the workforce (60.6%) is at its lowest level since records began in 2017.

The data showed small increases in the number of social work-registered senior managers and middle managers, who accounted for 2.1% and 5% of the workforce, respectively, in September 2024.

The number of first-line managers grew by just over 400 FTE staff, to 5,449.7, 15.9% of the workforce, up from 15.2% a year earlier.

Growing number of qualified staff not holding cases

The group that saw the biggest rise was qualified practitioners who were not holding cases, whose number increased by 1,700, to 6,373.1 – 18.6% of the workforce, up from 14.1% in 2023.

The DfE said this was caused in part by a new rule, under which practitioners previously categorised as case holders were reclassified as non-case holders if they did not hold any cases at the time of the data collection.

Social workers who do not hold cases, and are also not managers, include practice development, workforce development and quality assurance staff. Given that the DfE data is taken on 30 September each year, it may also include staff just starting their assessed and supported year in employment (ASYE) programme who have not yet been allocated a caseload.

Social workers ‘have faced impossible workloads for too long’

Janet Daby (credit: Richard Townsend Photography)

In response to the figures, children and families minister Janet Daby – herself a former social worker – said that practitioners had struggled for “too long” with “impossible workloads and an over-reliance on agency staff”.

Consequently, she said it was “encouraging” to see “average caseloads reducing, fewer agency workers and fewer people leaving the profession”.

However, she added: “I know that social workers still face significant challenges, which is why I’m determined to see this trend continue.”

She said that the profession was “at the heart” of the government’s plans to reform children’s social care.

‘Progress and ongoing challenges’ for workforce – ADCS

Echoing some of Daby’s message, the Association of Directors of Children’s Services said that the workforce data highlighted “both progress and ongoing challenges”.

Nicola Curley, chair of the ADCS’s workforce policy committee, said it was “encouraging” to see growth in the number of social workers and reduction in the use of agency staff.

However, she added: “Despite these positive trends, the high vacancy rate in some areas continues to be a concern.  Many local areas are facing their own pressures, and we need to ensure that national statistics don’t mask this.

“ADCS will continue to work with the Department for Education and others on implementing reforms to ensure they impact positively on children and families and result in the sustainable workforce they both need and deserve.”

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.

By Katharine Sacks-Jones, chief executive, Become

As social workers, playing a leading role in the lives of care-experienced young people, you know more than anyone the immense pressure the system is under.

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, introduced in December, clearly intends to improve children’s social care, through measures including better oversight and regulation about where children live and increased support for care leavers.

However, further scrutiny shows there are places where it could be strengthened, to significantly improve opportunities and experiences for care-experienced young people.

Last month, I gave evidence to the parliamentary committee looking at the bill, setting out what we welcome, and where it needs to go further for young people. After all, it’s only if their needs are being met that we know the system is working.

Strengthening Staying Close support

Statutory homelessness rates for care leavers aged 18-20 have increased by 54% in the past five years.

This has to change, which is why our End The Care Cliff campaign has been calling for the Staying Put and Staying Close schemes to be fully funded legal entitlements for all care leavers up to 25, unless they opt out.

It’s good news then that the bill says that local authorities must assess whether care leavers aged under 25 require Staying Close support and would then be under a duty to provide it to those in need.

But, as the criteria for assessment is not set out, we’re concerned this could lead to a rationing of support or a postcode lottery. We also want to see young people’s wishes and preferences taken into account in determining what support they might benefit from.

Going further on tackling care leaver homelessness

No young person should be facing homelessness, so it was especially welcome to see the government taking up a key ask of End the Care Cliff, by proposing an amendment to prevent care leavers from being found intentionally homeless. Now we’d like them to go further.

Currently, care leavers aged 18-20 are automatically assessed as being in ‘priority need’, which means local authorities are required to provide them with accommodation.

We think the bill should extend this to care leavers up to the age of 25, giving them a much-needed safety net.

The importance of financial support to care leavers

The bill will require local authorities to publish information about how they are supporting care leavers, particularly around housing, which we think is a positive move.

We frequently hear from young people on our Care Advice Line who are in acute financial crisis, so would like to see an additional focus on what financial support is available to young people leaving care.

Extending corporate parenting duties beyond councils

We’re disappointed that government proposals to extend corporate parenting duties to other public bodies are not currently included in the legislation, and hope they will reconsider bringing forward this important measure.

Preventing distant placements by regional commissioners

The bill gives the government new powers to direct neighbouring local authorities to commission care jointly, with the aim of improving their assessments of need and strategies for ensuring sufficient placements.

We want to make sure that these regional co-operation arrangements don’t lead to more children being moved far from their local area, even if it’s still within the region.

Our Gone Too Far campaign highlights the negative impact of moving children far from families, friends and schools. Far too many young people tell us how this is disrupting their education, affecting their mental health, breaking their connections and leaving them isolated.

This is why we’d like a safeguard in the bill to prevent distant moves when it’s not in children’s best interests.

Requiring a national sufficiency plan

Local authorities are required to offer sufficient, suitable accommodation for children in their care. Underfunding and an increase in the number of children in care have made this challenging.

This has created huge instability for children and led to an increasing number of children living far away.

Whilst the bill introduces a number of welcome measures, including better financial oversight and powers to bring in profit caps for private providers, it doesn’t mention how it will boost capacity.

There needs to be a national strategy to understand how many children in care are living in places that don’t meet their needs, what’s needed to address this and how government will support local authorities to deliver.

Being ambitious for care-experienced young people

We know from the work we do with professionals like you that only so much can be done with the resources available, which is why we need to see funding commitments flowing from this legislation too.

It’s time to be ambitious and deliver the changes care-experienced young people need.

Become supports children in care and young care leavers 

MPs have backed a plan enabling the government to regulate the use of agency staff in local authority children’s services.

The committee scrutinising the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill affirmed the measure, without any dissent, in a debate on the legislation yesterday (28 January).

However, opposition members raised concerns about the provision exacerbating workforce shortages in children’s social care and questioned what the government was doing to attract more people into permanent roles.

For the government, minister for school standards Catherine McKinnell said the measure would help tackle “the significant affordability and stability challenges that have arisen from the increase in the use and cost of agency workers in local authority children’s social care in England”.

Rising proportion of locum workers

The proportion of full-time equivalent (FTE) council children’s social workers who were locums rose from 15.5% to 17.8%, from 2021-23, according to Department for Education figures.

The rise coincided with increasing warnings from directors of children’s services about the practices of some agencies.

This included supplying authorities with project teams of agency workers, often managed externally, rather than filling the specific roles councils wanted to be filled, significantly inflating costs.

New rules on use of agency social workers

On the back of this, the previous government introduced rules restricting councils’ use of agency social workers last year; these will be fully in force by October of this year.

The rules include a ban on social workers without three years’ permanent experience taking up an agency post, a requirement that project teams be directly managed by local authorities and a three-month prohibition on staff who had just left a permanent role from taking up an agency position in the same region.

Councils were also tasked with agreeing regional caps on hourly pay for agency staff in different roles.

With the exception of a statutory requirement to supply the DfE with data on their agency usage, the rules have been issued under statutory guidance, meaning councils may deviate from them in exceptional circumstances.

Why government wants to legislate

McKinnell said this was one of the reasons the government planned to put its proposed restrictions on agency use into law.

“Guidance can be departed from in certain circumstances, so we feel introducing regulations on the use of agency workers is appropriate and proportionate.”

She said that by reducing their spend on agency workers, councils would be able to “invest more in services supporting children and families and enhance the offer to permanent employees”.

Though the provisions were not dissented from by the six opposition members on the 17-strong bill committee, both Conservative shadow education minister Neil O’Brien and Liberal Democrat counterpart Munira Wilson raised concerns about aspects of the plans.

Risk of councils being ‘micromanaged’

O’Brien said the bill would allow for ministers to take “very strong” powers to regulate the use of agency staff, enabling them to “micromanage” authorities, including by potentially directly setting pay rates in individual councils

He pointed to the “huge variations” in rates of agency use – which ranged from 0 to 50% in 2023 between council areas – as meaning that “applying the same rules or caps or limits to places facing totally different situations [was] a risky thing to do”.

He also warned that, without addressing the supply of social workers, “crudely trying to cap prices runs the risk of simply leading to more vacancies”.

Tackling root causes of staff choosing agency work

For the Lib Dems, Wilson said she recognised the need to promote a more stable workforce because of the impact on children of multiple changes in social workers. However, echoing O’Brien, she said there was nothing in the bill that would address the reasons why practitioners choose agency work.

“I’d like to hear from the minister whether they have workforce strategy to address the root causes that we have more and more social workers opting for agency contracts, which is neither good for the taxpayer, not good for the child’s experiences.”

In response, McKinnell said that the government recognised that “regulation alone [was] not the answer”, and that it was working with councils to attract and retain staff and provide “positive working environments for all who work in children’s social care”.

She stressed that the legislation would require the government to consult before drawing up the regulations, and it was committed to working with the sector to ensure the measures were “proportionate and effective”.

What’s next for the bill?

The committee will continue to scrutinise the bill in detail, potentially amending it in the process. Given Labour’s majority, such amendments will only pass with the government’s support.

Following the committee stage, the bill will be reconsidered by the whole House of Commons at the report stage, where it can be amended further, and at its third reading, where it will be voted on as a whole.

After that, the bill will pass to the House of Lords for consideration. Should peers revise the legislation, the two houses will need to then agree a common version of the bill, though peers will generally give way to MPs on this.

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

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

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

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

Growing numbers of home educated children

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

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

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

Lack of staff in local authorities

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

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

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

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

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

‘Need to skill up home education staff on safeguarding’

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

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

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

Multi-agency child protection teams

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

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

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

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

Suggested benefits of joint safeguarding teams

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

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

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

Concerns over social worker burnout

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

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

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

‘Risk of increasing volume of information’

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

By Tim Spencer-Lane

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill was introduced in Parliament on 17 December 2024.

Part 1 of the bill contains reforms to children’s social care. Part 2 makes provision relating to education in England. Most of the social care reforms were foreshadowed in the policy paper, ‘Keeping children safe, helping families thrive’, which was published in November 2024.

This article summarises the main provisions that will impact on social workers.

Family group decision making

The bill would add a new section to the Children Act 1989 to impose a duty on local authorities who are considering making a court application for a care or supervision order, to offer a family group decision making (FGDM) meeting to the child’s parents or any person with parental responsibility for the child.

The purpose of the FGDM meeting is to enable a child’s family network to meet to discuss the welfare needs of the child and to make a proposal in response to concerns about the child’s welfare.

The duty does not apply if the local authority determines that it would not be in the child’s best interests.

Child protection and safeguarding

Safeguarding partners

The bill seeks to amend the Children Act 2004 to make it a requirement for the three safeguarding partners (the local authority, NHS integrated care board and police) in each local area to include education and childcare “relevant agencies” as mandatory participants in their multi-agency safeguarding arrangements. Currently, safeguarding partners only need to make arrangements to work with a “relevant agency” if they consider it appropriate to do so.

Multi-agency child protection teams

The bill would insert new sections into the Children Act 2004 to require safeguarding partners to establish and run at least one multi-agency child protection team in their area. The main purpose of these new teams is to support the local authority in delivering its child protection duties under section 47 of the Children Act 1989.

ICBs will be required to nominate a health professional with experience in relation to children’s health, while the police will be required to nominate an officer to be part of each multi-agency child protection team. The local authority is required to nominate someone with experience in education in relation to children and a social worker with experience in relation to children, and may appoint other appropriate individuals after consultation with safeguarding partners.

Information sharing

The bill would also amend the Children Act 2004 to impose a duty on specified persons and bodies to disclose information that may be relevant to safeguarding or promoting the welfare of a child, to other relevant persons in certain circumstances. The duty applies where the person considers that the disclosure may facilitate the exercise by the recipient of any of its functions that relate to safeguarding or promoting the welfare of children, unless disclosure would be detrimental to the child.

The duty to share information will apply to persons listed in section 11(1) of the Children Act 2004, including local authorities, ICBs, NHS trusts/foundation trusts, police forces, probation services and youth offending teams, along with education and childcare “relevant agencies”.

Consistent child identifier

The bill also makes provision, under the Children Act 2004, for a consistent child identifier (also known as a single unique identifier or SUI). Designated persons must include the consistent identifier when processing information about a child for safeguarding and promotion of welfare purposes.

Support for children in care or kinship care, and those leaving care

Kinship local offer

The bill would amend the Children Act 1989 to require local authorities to publish information about their general approach to supporting children in kinship care and kinship carers in their area, as well as financial support which may be available to them in their area (the “kinship local offer”).

Local authorities must take such steps as are reasonably practicable to ensure that children in kinship care and kinship carers receive the information in the kinship local offer.

Supporting educational achievement

Under amendments to the Children Act 1989, local authorities would be required to take appropriate measures to support the educational outcomes of children in need and children in kinship care.

The steps that can be taken under this duty include enabling children to overcome barriers to their educational achievement and improving educational attendance. The duty is a strategic duty, which does not extend to the educational outcomes of individual children.

The local authority must appoint at least one person to discharge the duty (in practice this is usually the virtual school head).

Supporting care leavers

The bill would also introduce a new provision in the Children Act 1989 to require each local authority to consider whether each former relevant child (up to age 25) requires “staying close support” and where their welfare requires it, to offer that support.

“Staying close support” is support to assist the former relevant child: (1) to find and keep suitable accommodation and (2) to access services relating to health and wellbeing, relationships, education and training, employment and participating in society. Support means the provision of advice, information and representation.

There are also amendments to the Children and Social Work Act 2017 to require each local authority to also publish the arrangements it has in place to support and assist care leavers in their transition to adulthood and independent living.

Accommodation of children

Regional co-operation

The bill seeks to amend the Children Act 1989 to give the secretary of state powers to direct two or more local authorities to make regional co-operation arrangements to carry out their functions in relation to the accommodation of looked after children.

The arrangements could be: (1) to carry out their strategic accommodation functions jointly, (2) for those functions to be carried out by one of the local authorities on behalf of the others or (3) for a corporate body, of a kind that may be specified in the secretary of state’s direction, to support them in carrying out those functions.

Deprivation of liberty

The bill also includes a number of changes to section 25 of the Children Act 1989. It would change the references from “restricting” liberty to “depriving” children of their liberty, to better reflect the nature and purpose of this section.

The bill would also provide for the authorisation of the deprivation of liberty of children in alternative placement types beyond just a secure children’s home. It brings within the scope of section 25 accommodation provided for the purpose of care and treatment of children that is capable of being used to deprive a child of their liberty (“relevant accommodation”).

The secretary of state would have powers to set out in regulations: (1) the maximum period for which a child may be kept in relevant accommodation both with and without the authority of a court, (2) the cohort of children who may be placed in relevant accommodation, and (3) a description of the alternative accommodation.

Currently, many children are being deprived of their liberty outside of a statutory framework, via the inherent jurisdiction of the High Court.

The government’s intention is to “provide an alternative statutory route to authorise the deprivation of liberty of a child in a more flexible form of accommodation, bringing more deprivation of liberty cases under a statutory framework via section 25, including its criteria for access, mandatory review points and parity with [secure children’s homes] in terms of access to legal aid”.

Regulating provider groups

The bill would give new powers to Ofsted in relation to parent undertakings (ie where more than one setting is owned or controlled by the same private or voluntary provider group).

The bill seeks to place a duty on parent undertakings to develop and implement an improvement plan where Ofsted have identified quality issues in multiple settings and reasonably suspects there are grounds for cancellation of registration in relation to those settings.

Should parent undertakings not comply with these requirements, Ofsted will have the power to issue an unlimited monetary penalty.

Tackling unregistered children’s homes

The bill also includes new powers for Ofsted to impose monetary penalties for breaches of the Care Standards Act 2000, including for operating unregistered children’s homes. This is designed to give Ofsted a quicker alternative to prosecution in these cases.

Financial oversight regime

The bill would also introduce a financial oversight regime for relevant children’s social care providers who meet conditions that will be set out in regulations. These are likely to relate to the size of the provider and whether it would be difficult to replace were it to fail.

The bill would give the secretary of state the power to require providers made subject to the regime to submit a “recovery and resolution plan”, setting out risks to their financial sustainability and actions they propose to take in response to these.

The secretary of state would also have the power to arrange an independent business review of a provider where there is significant financial risk to its sustainability. The secretary of state would also be under a duty to warn local authorities if there was a real possibility of relevant services failing, with potential adverse effects for the councils or any children looked after by them.

Limiting profits

The bill also provides for regulations to be made enabling the secretary of state to cap any profit made by a non-local authority registered children’s social care provider. The secretary of state may only make such regulations if satisfied that it is necessary to do so.

The government has said that it only intends to use the provision if other policies do not sufficiently reduce profiteering in the children’s social care placements market.

Agency workers

The bill seeks to provide a power for the secretary of state to make regulations applying to all English local authorities on the use of “agency workers” in children’s social care. The regulations may require that the agency workers meet certain requirements and make provision about how they should be managed and the terms on which they are supplied to local authorities.

When in force, this regime would replace the rules, introduced in 2024 under statutory guidance, regarding local authorities’ use of agency social workers in children’s services.

Ill-treatment or wilful neglect

This bill also intends to close a gap in existing legislation by extending the offences of ill-treatment or wilful neglect by a care worker or care provider to someone in their care, under the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015, to children aged 16 or 17 in regulated establishments in England.

Currently, the 2015 act protects against ill-treatment or wilful neglect by care workers providing health care for an adult or child or social care for an adult, while the Children and Young Persons Act protects those under 16 from cruelty by those who have responsibility for them.

Children not in school

The bill proposes a number of reforms aimed at protecting children who are being educated at home. Most of these involve amendments to the Education Act 1996 and include:

• Compulsory registers of children not in school in each local authority area in England, and a duty on local authorities to support the children on their registers (should a parent request this).
• Changes to the school attendance order (SAO) legal framework, for example, by introducing statutory timeframes for issuing and processing SAOs and making it an offence for parents to withdraw a child subject to an SAO from school without following the proper procedure.
• A requirement for a parent to obtain local authority consent to home educate if a child is: (1) subject to an enquiry under section 47 of the Children Act 1989, (2) on a child protection plan, or (3) at a special school or academy.
• A power for the local authority, in cases where a child is subject to a section 47 Children Act 1989 enquiry or on a child protection plan and is already being home educated, to review whether it is in the best interests of the child to be in school and require that the child be registered at a school.
• A duty for local authorities to consider the home environment and other learning environments when determining whether or not such children should be required to attend school.

What happens next?

The bill will be subject to debate in Parliament and will no doubt be amended during its passage. It is likely to become law sometime in spring 2025.

Some provisions will come into force the day the act is passed (such as the powers to make regulations and orders), others will come into force two months later (such as the duty to publish information for kinship carers and children in kinship arrangements, and the extension of the ill-treatment or wilful neglect offences.

Some provisions will be implemented over a longer period of time. For example, the new multi-agency child protection teams will not be implemented until 2027.

Tim Spencer-Lane is a lawyer specialising in social care, mental capacity and mental health and is legal editor of Community Care Inform.