New ADCS president sets out stall as government embarks on children’s social care reforms

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.

“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.”