Council to vote on bringing children’s services back in-house

A council is to vote on taking back control of children’s services from an external provider.

Reading council’s policy committee voted on 18 December to accept officers’ recommendation that it insource services from Brighter Futures for Children (BFfC).

It will now go forward to the full council on 28 January 2025 for sign-off. The transition, including the transfer of 550 staff to the council, would then start in February.

Contract review

The proposal follows a scheduled review of the arrangement triggered by the fact that BFfC’s seven-year contract with the council expires in April 2026

BFfC, a not-for-profit company wholly owned by the council, took over the running of children’s social care in the borough in November 2018, after the Department for Education (DfE) directed the authority to outsource its then inadequate-rated services to an alternative provider.

For its contract review, Reading council asked the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) to assess potential options, with the organisation recommending a full insourcing of services.

Services not yet ‘good’

CIPFA said that a “significant factor” behind its recommendation was that BFfC had not achieved the “overarching ambition” of the contract, which was to improve Reading’s Ofsted rating to good.

Following an inspection in 2019, Ofsted gave the borough’s services a requires improvement rating. However, there was no progress on this overall grade after Reading children’s services’ latest inspection, in September 2024.

Though Ofsted rated services for children in care and care leavers as good – a step-up from the requires improvement grade they received in 2019 – it concluded that there was “still inconsistency in the quality of practice and insufficient progress in certain areas”.

CIPFA said it had recognised that there had been “factors beyond BFfC’s control that have contributed to this” and acknowledged the company’s work to improve services. However, it concluded that the council was best placed to take forward the improvement of the borough’s children’s services now.

Benefits from insourcing services

It listed a number of benefits for the council from insourcing services, including:

• Greater direct control over service delivery and operations.
• Reducing demands on officers’ time to maintain service level agreements with the company and eliminating a ‘layer of separation’ between children’s services and the council.
• Potential for greater integration of children’s services into wider council operations, enhancing the cost-effectiveness of service delivery.
• Assurance that children’s services are supporting the wider corporate plans and are more responsive to the council’s changing needs.
• Potential cost savings resulting from the removal of governance structures and operational duplication of approximately £200,000 – £300,000 a year.

These points are all applicable to outsourced children’s services generally and reflect a general turning away from the model nationally.

Turning away from children’s trust model

Since 2020, just one trust has been created, in Bradford, while Doncaster took its services back in-house in 2022 and Worcestershire did so this year.

During this time, trusts have been considered in other areas subject to statutory directions due to poor performance, but eventually rejected on the advice of DfE-appointed commissioners.

In two of these areas – Medway and West Sussex – the authority made significant improvements, with the former earning a good rating and the latter a requires improvement grade, with good features, from Ofsted last year.

In other cases, such as Herefordshire, North East Lincolnshire, Solihull and Sefton, commissioners rejected a trust on the grounds of the potential disruption to improvements of transferring services to a new body, and the delay to progress that would result from creating such an organisation.

Instead, they have tended to recommend that the authority be supported to improve by a high-performing council, such as those listed as sector-led improvement partners by the DfE.

The DfE, meanwhile, is working on a project to develop a “more cost-effective” alternative to children’s trusts for struggling services.

Were Reading to resume control of its children’s services, that would leave trusts or companies running provision in 10 of the 153 councils.

Praise for company’s staff

The turning away from outsourcing was reflected in BFfC’s reaction to the news.

The chair of its board, Di Smith, said “The board of Brighter Futures for Children supports the proposal to return full responsibility for the delivery of children’s services to the council. We recognise that alternative delivery models in children’s services have become less popular in recent years and are now very rarely the preferred option in response to statutory intervention.

“Given the national picture of increased costs and pressures in children’s services, it is logical that councils, including Reading council, would want to have full control of delivery and expenditure at this present moment in time.”

Speaking before the policy committee’s vote, Reading council’s leader, Liz Terry, said: “I want to place on record my enormous gratitude to BFfC staff, whose commitment and dedication to children in Reading is without question. We are committed to ensuring those same children and young people are not affected as we go through this process.”