Further delay to the reform of children’s social care will prolong the “crisis” the sector is in and increase costs, charities have warned in response to the Budget.

The Children’s Charities Coalition issued the message after the government indicated that “fundamental reform” of the sector would be implemented from April 2026 at the earliest, in its Budget document, published yesterday.

In the meantime, ministers have allocated over £250m for 2025-26 to “test innovative measures to support children and reduce costs for local authorities”, including allowances for kinship carers and the rollout of regional hubs to support foster care recruitment.

Testing ideas for reform

This is in addition to the £200m that was allocated by the previous Conservative government from 2023-25 to test measures from last year’s Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy, including the regional commissioning of care placements, setting up specialist child protection teams and establishing family help services.

The latter involve the merger of existing child in need and targeted early help teams and are designed to provide struggling families with earlier, less stigmatising support to help them resolve problems and keep their children.

They were the centrepiece of the 2022 final report of now Labour MP Josh MacAlister’s Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, which proposed investing £2bn in family help over four years, part of a £2.6bn package for the sector as a whole.

Care review lead Josh MacAlister

Investing in earlier help to reduce care population

MacAlister’s thesis was that investment in family help, alongside other reforms, would reverse “a trajectory of rising costs, with more children being looked after and continually poor outcomes for too many children and families”.

As a result, 30,000 fewer children would be in care by 2032-33 than would have been the case without reform, he said.

However, this was dependent on the reforms being implemented from 2023-24. Instead, the previous government responded by testing the measures proposed by MacAlister from 2023-25, leading him to warn that the sector was a “burning platform” and needed more urgent transformation.

‘Social care is in crisis today’

Meanwhile, a report for the Children’s Charities Coalition, which comprises Action for Children, Barnardo’s, the National Children’s Bureau, NSPCC and The Children’s Society, found that the government’s approach would cost the social care system an extra £200m a year over the long run.

The testing phase will now continue for a further year, with the government saying it would set out “plans for fundamental reform of the children’s social care system in phase 2 of the spending review”. This will report next spring, setting public spending plans for 2026 onwards.

“The government has also confirmed its commitment to further reforms to children’s social care in future spending reviews, but children’s social care is in crisis today,” the Children’s Charities Coalition said. “Further delays will see [costs] escalate.”

‘Promoting early intervention and fixing care market’

The government said its reform plan would include “promoting early intervention to help children stay with their families where possible and fixing the broken care market”. Some of its component parts will be included in the forthcoming Children’s Wellbeing Bill, which ministers have said will include measures to tighten regulation of care placements.

The Department for Education is yet to set out details of how the more than £250m for 2025-26 will be spent, beyond allocating £44m to testing financial allowances for kinship carers in up to 10 areas and extending regional fostering recruitment hubs to all council areas.

The latter provide a single point of contact for people interested in fostering and support them through the process from initial enquiry to application, and are designed to boost recruitment.

Further testing of family help and regional commissioning 

The remainder of the more than £250m is likely to include further funding for the families first for children programme, which comprises the family help model and specialist child protection teams and is being tested in 10 areas.

It may also resource the further testing of regional care co-operatives (RCCs), which are trialling the regional commissioning and delivery of care placements in the South East and Greater Manchester.

RCCs are designed to give councils – collectively – greater clout to shape services across their regions and ensure sufficient high-quality placements for children in care, in the context of widespread concern about current provision.

Families need support ‘when challenges are emerging’

Family Rights Group (FRG) chief executive Cathy Ashley welcomed the increased investment in kinship and foster care.

She added: “The spending review and the upcoming Children’s Wellbeing Bill must now prioritise the wider reforms the child welfare system urgently needs.”

“Children and parents need support when challenges are emerging. Family and friends should be given the opportunity to find solutions with a right to a family group conference safely averting children going into care.

“Kinship care needs to be defined in law alongside the practical, emotional and financial support kinship families need. And no child in care or care leaver should be left isolated and alone, with the offer of Lifelong Links [an FRG programme] to build those loving relationships we all need.”

DfE ‘must work at pace on kinship allowances’

The charity Kinship said: “We urge the Department for Education to work at pace to confirm plans for the kinship allowance trial so that kinship carers across England can understand how it might impact them.

“Although the trial will ensure more kinship families get the financial support they need to help children thrive, it must not paralyse progress towards a wider rollout of financial allowances for kinship carers across the country.”

Alongside the reform funding, the Budget also pledged an extra £1.3bn in grant funding for local authorities for 2025-26, at least £600m would be allocated to social care.

Concerns pay and tax rises will swallow up social care funding boost

In total, the government said local authority “spending power” – the maximum resource that councils have available to them – would rise by an estimated 3.2% next year. However, the £600m for social care falls far short of the £3.4bn in additional pressures that the Local Government Association (LGA) has calculated councils will face in adults’ and children’s services in 2025-26, compared with 2024-25.

Also, adult social care leaders have warned that extra funding risks being swallowed up by the costs to providers of rises in the national living wage and employer national insurance contributions.

For the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS), president Andy Smith said the funding for councils, while welcome, was a “short-term” measure.

“In order to ensure the stability of many vital and valued services, long-term, sustainable funding for local government and children’s services is the only solution,” he added.

Smith urged ministers to set out “sufficient multi-year settlements for local authorities so they can effectively plan for the future”.

The government is committed to introducing multi-year funding settlements, alongside reforms to how resources for councils are allocated, from 2026-27 onwards.

The Labour government has given its explicit backing to the family help model initiated by its Conservative predecessor to promote earlier intervention for families in need.

Children’s minister Janet Daby said the model, currently being tested in 10 areas, was “central” to its plans for reforming children’s social care, in response to a written parliamentary question from fellow Labour MP Gareth Snell.

The approach involves providing families in need with multidisciplinary support designed to resolve the issues they face without the need for more intervention, reduce stigma and remove the bureaucracy of moving cases between targeted early help and child in need, which are merged under the model.

Key proposal from care review and Stable Homes strategy

It was the central proposal from the 2021-22 Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, which called for £2bn to be invested in family help over four years, to rebalance the system away from child protection and reduce the numbers going into care.

It was then taken up by the Conservatives’ 2023 Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy, which set aside just under £40m over two years to test the model – and related initiatives – through the families first for children pathfinder, which is now operating in 10 areas.

Labour did not reference family help or promoting earlier intervention with children in either its manifesto for July’s general election or in the subsequent King’s Speech, in which it announced that a forthcoming Children’s Wellbeing Bill would strengthen multi-agency safeguarding arrangements.

Last month, Department for Education minister Jacqui Smith told the House of Lords that the government shared the care review’s objective of bringing “timely support to children and families” and that it would “build on” the families first for children pathfinder in doing so, without setting out how.

Labour gives explicit backing to family help

However, in her response to Snell, issued last week, Daby explicitly confirmed the government’s support for pathfinder programme and for family help as a cornerstone of its approach to children’s social care reform.

“We recognise that there is a strong evidence base for early intervention and whole family working to support families with multiple issues before they reach crisis point, to stay together and thrive,” said Daby.

In an echo of the Stable Homes strategy, she added: “This is at the heart of our reform agenda to rebalance the children’s social care system toward earlier intervention, which is aimed at improving families’ lives today, their outcomes in the future, and reducing costs to public services.”

“Central to this ambition is testing a new model of family help which builds on best practice from well-evidenced programmes such as Supporting Families and Pause, which feature whole-family working and lead practitioners providing dedicated support to prevent re-referrals.”

Supporting Families – previously the Troubled Families programme – involves allocating key workers to provide early and co-ordinated support for families with multiple needs to help improve outcomes and reduce costs to the state, while Pause is a support scheme for women at risk of having more than one child removed.

‘Supporting families at the earliest opportunity’

Daby said the families first for children pathfinders were “providing targeted support to help families overcome challenges at the earliest opportunity”, while also “involving [family networks] in decision-making at an earlier stage”.

The pathfinder also involves authorities establishing expert multi-agency child protection teams, with cases led by specialist social workers known as lead child protection practitioners.

The minister – a former fostering social worker – added that early findings from an independent evaluation of the pathfinder were due in spring 2025.

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The Conservatives have allocated no new funding to reforming children’s social care in their election manifesto, despite the blueprint for the changes carrying a £2.6bn bill.

The manifesto, issued yesterday, made two specific pledges on children’s social care, to create more places in children’s homes and to expand befriending and mentoring programmes for care leavers.

The document also made more generalised commitments to prioritise keeping children with their families where that was best for them, including through its kinship care strategy, support adoption, where that was the better option, and help care leavers with housing, education and employment.

However, there was no funding attached to these proposals, or children’s social care generally, in the accompanying costings document, nor was there any specific commitment to roll out the government’s current sector reforms.

The proposed changes, set out in last year’s Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy, are designed to ensure that many more children are supported to stay with their families or, where this is not possible, with kinship carers; that those at risk are much better protected than is currently the case, and that those who do need to go into care receive a much better experience and, as a result, better life chances than now.

£2.6bn cost for care review reforms

The Department for Education (DfE) has invested £200m from 2023-25 in testing the planned changes, for example, through the 10 families first for children pathfinder areas. They are trialling setting up multi-disciplinary family help teams, through the merger of targeted early help and child in need services, to provide more effective and non-stigmatising support to families, as well as testing specialist child protection teams.

However, the blueprint for the reforms – the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care’s final report, published in 2022 – costed the rollout of the changes at £2.6bn over four years, the vast majority of which would be spent on family help (£2bn).

This would generate savings by year five of the reform programme, through a reduction in the number of children in care, but this would only happen as a result of the up-front investment, according to care review lead Josh MacAlister.

Children’s home funding already committed

The pledge to create more children’s home places in the manifesto is likely to be a reference to the £165m announced by chancellor Jeremy Hunt in his spring budget this year to develop open and secure homes over the next four years.

In relation to the plan to expand befriending and mentoring schemes for care leavers, it is not clear whether this goes beyond the DfE’s existing plan to spend £18.4m on these and family finding programmes in 2024-25, up from £11.7m last year.

The funding is designed to help looked-after children and care leavers identify and connect with important people in their lives, improve their sense of identity and community and create and sustain consistent, stable and loving relationships.

‘Limited progress on care review recommendations’ – charities

The Conservatives had pledged to review the care system in their 2019 manifesto and went on to commission MacAlister, who is a Labour candidate in the election, to carry out a broader review of children’s social care.

In a comment on the party’s latest manifesto, the Children’s Charities Coalition, which includes Action for Children, Barnardo’s, the Children’s Society, the NCB and the NSPCC, said: “They delivered on this but there’s been limited progress on its recommendations and it sadly will not create the long-lasting change that is so desperately needed.”

For the charity Kinship, head of policy and public affairs Sam Turner said: “While we are pleased to see the Conservative party manifesto commit to prioritising kinship care where best for the child, we’re disappointed that no further ambitions are set out which go beyond the existing commitments made in the national kinship care strategy.”

The strategy includes plans to pilot giving some kinship carers equivalent allowances to foster carers and expand the role of virtual headteachers to cover support for children of kinship carers in education, as well as those who are looked after.

However, the DfE was criticised, including by Kinship, for not providing financial support for kinship carers more generally and not giving them a statutory right to paid leave, as is the case with adoptive parents.

Lack of funding ‘at odds with crisis facing councils’

In relation to the Conservative manifesto, Turner added: “The lack of any detail on additional spending for children’s social care within the manifesto costings document sits at odds with the significant funding crisis facing local authority children’s services. Investing in well-supported kinship care is part of the solution.”

He called on the next UK government to deliver on the proposals in Kinship’s own manifesto for the election, to provide carers with equivalent levels of support to foster carers in relation to allowances, training and therapeutic support for children, and to adoptive parents in relation to paid leave.

Fellow charity Become, which supports looked-after children and young care leavers, also gave the mainfesto a mixed response.

“We welcome the Conservative Party manifesto pledges to provide more places in children’s homes, as well as to increase support for care leavers – issues we raise in our own manifesto,” said CEO Katharine Sacks-Jones.

“However broader reform and meaningful investment is needed to address the huge challenges facing children’s social care.”

“The next government must act urgently to increase the supply of suitable residential and foster homes across the country, ensuring children can stay close to the people and places that matter to them, and to end the care cliff, the expectation for young people to leave care at 18 and become independent overnight,” she added.

The Conservative Party has been approached for comment.

Our interview with Eileen Munro is part of a series of profiles of key figures who have shaped social work over the past five decades, to mark Community Care’s 50th anniversary.

One look at Professor Eileen Munro’s resume and it becomes clear that staying idle is not her strong suit.

A social worker who qualified in the 1970s and then became professor of social policy at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Munro’s research has informed the work of countless child protection services in the country and she is still actively involved in research today.

However, what she is best known for is her influential government-commissioned review of child protection in England in 2010-11.

The Munro review of child protection

In the final report of her review, Munro wrote that she wanted child protection to move from being “a system that has become over-bureaucratised and focused on compliance to one that values and develops professional expertise and is focused on the safety and welfare of children and young people”.

On one level, she has succeeded; several of her recommendations remain in place today.

Children whose referrals are accepted now receive a single assessment, rather than separate initial and core assessments, each with their own timeframes, as previously.

Working Together to Safeguard Children, whose 2010 version stretched to almost 400 pages, is now less than half that length with much less prescriptiveness from central government.

The same statutory guidance advises that local safeguarding partners consider the “principles of the systems methodology recommended by the Munro review” when commissioning local child safeguarding practice reviews. This involves moving from a blame culture to identifying the underlying issues shaping professional practice.

Ofsted inspections are unannounced, not scheduled. And there are chief social workers for children’s and adults’ services within the government and principal social workers for each service in every local authority.

The persistence of social work bureaucracy

Yet 10 years after Munro’s report, another government-commissioned report concluded that the “underlying problems” she identified remained, based on feedback from over 1,000 practitioners, academics, leaders and people with lived experience.

In the initial report from his Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, Josh MacAlister said that “high levels of bureaucracy remain and [social workers] do not have enough time and resources to help and build relationships with families”.

In a survey the following year, children’s social workers reported spending 59% of their working time doing case-related paperwork. In his final report, published in the same year, MacAlister described this as “a staggering misuse of the greatest asset the children’s social care system has – its social workers”.

And the causes that he identified – excessive national policy requirements, the time spent preparing for inspection, poor IT systems and risk averse decision making – were strikingly similar to those flagged up Munro.

The fear of change

Today Munro admits that the system she envisioned when drafting her recommendations has not come to pass – in significant part because her report coincided with the 2010 coalition government ushering in a series of public spending cuts.

But she suggests that she also underestimated at the time “how paralysing” steering away from compliance can be. It is difficult to take risks with the threat of an Ofsted review always around the corner.

“[Councils] have their eye on the child but also on the Department for Education (DfE) and Ofsted and the reality is, if you get a bad Ofsted judgment, the director is likely to get sacked,” Munro says.

“It matters to them, so that often ends up distorting priorities; although Ofsted has become better at looking at the quality of practice.”

Following procedures can also protect practitioners in tragic scenarios. When the media storm inevitably begins, a set list of procedures can be proof that the social worker did everything they were supposed to.

“If you say good practice is about engaging well and making well-reasoned judgments, then, when something goes bad, others can say, ‘But the child died’. But the truth is you can’t predict the future entirely and you may be misled by parents.”

Josh McAlister’s care review

Care review lead Josh MacAlister

MacAlister’s 2022 Independent Review of Children’s Social Care was the first review of children’s social care since Munro’s.

It has also led to the most significant reforms the sector has seen in years, through the DfE’s Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy, which is currently being implemented.

Yet, while being sympathetic to the process of conducting a review, Munro doesn’t sound hopeful about the outcome of MacAlister’s recommendations.

“Like me, he’s coming up with recommendations during a terrible economic time. All of the major public sector services have fallen under strain. I’ve never known it quite so bad,” says Munro.

Enhanced early prevention, but without funding

Photo: Vitalii Vodolazskyi/Adobe Stock

As well as their critiques of the level of bureaucracy in social work, the Munro and the MacAlister reviews also shared a belief in the value of early help in improving families’ lives.

In her report, Munro called for councils to be placed under a duty to deliver early intervention services, but this was rejected by the government.

Thirteen years later, under MacAlister’s recommendation, some local authorities are testing a new model, ‘family help’, designed to provide families with earlier support to stave off crises.

MacAlister’s recommendation was for family help to be backed by roughly £2bn over five years to help target half a million children needing extra support. Yet the government has so far allocated just under £40m to test the model in ten areas.

Though MacAlister’s figure was intended to support a national rollout, the DfE has made no such commitment as yet amid the uncertainty of an impending election.

“They said yes to [his recommendation] but not to funding [it], which seems to me the worst of all worlds,” says Munro.

“Trying to increase the amount of early help available as I wanted to would be brilliant – the number of people who could benefit from some early help is gigantic. But where’s the workforce going to come from?”

Improving working conditions for social workers

With no extra funding in sight, Munro says the only way forward is through local efforts to improve working conditions and address the high staff turnover rates in children’s services.

“Work conditions are where I would want to focus change at the moment. And that’s not about tinkering with structures, it is about [enabling] workers to have more time to reflect and do direct work.

“To me, that is the priority – creating conditions in which people want to stay in the job because […] we need experienced workers who can help newcomers to build strength.”

The lack of direct work in favour of paperwork is something she finds dangerous – particularly the idea that social workers don’t do enough visits “to feel confident in their judgment”.

“The danger is for themselves as much as for the child. [They] should be able to go home at night with an easy conscience.”

In a soon-to-be-released research project of hers, social workers in a local authority were given an iPad where they could work alongside a family during a visit to write their report or dictate it to an AI transcription app in their car on their way back to the office.

“You come back to the office and you have finished the report and involved [the family] much more. It saved [practitioners] time and helped them clear their brain of that family before they went to see someone else – which was something I remember finding as well back when we had dictaphones and secretaries to transcribe.”

‘My team was my main source of supervision’

Photo: fotogestoeber/Adobe Stock

But while improving the working culture of children’s social work may include choosing user-friendly software, it is also about strengthening teams, says Munro.

The Covid-generated culture of working from home is something Munro disagrees with – the team should be in the same room as often as possible, she says.

“My team was my main source of supervision and support. My supervisor was useful, but it’s the team that you went back to after a difficult interview and asked if you could chat with somebody about your process,” she says.

“[Colleagues] help each other’s reasoning, they help each other cope with the impact of the work. It’s much easier to hear from a colleague that you perhaps overlooked the second boy. You don’t get as defensive about it. They’re your friend.”

But any functioning team also relies on senior management, which, she says, is more detached from frontline social work than ever, making them perhaps less sympathetic to the realities of it.

“I now regret that I didn’t recommend that all directors spent half a day on duty every month or something like that,” she adds.

MacAlister made a similar recommendation – that all registered social workers, at whatever level, do 100 hours of direct practice each year – but this is not being taken forward.

Munro tells me that, in the early years of her career, a child remained with their social worker, even when that practitioner became a senior manager – “the continuity of care was so important, and we have lost that”.

“Once you’re away from the frontline, you forget quite how chaotic and messy the reality of it is. You get a much cleaner, more sanitised version of it. That’s dangerous.”

‘We should do more celebrating of social work’

Despite it all, her faith in the system is intact – lately there’s been “a growing number of outstanding authorities and a general trend of improvement”.

“There’s always that sense of, ‘I’ve seen this before’, but I do think the big trend is upward. Our understanding and knowledge are much better than when I began and some of the local authorities are outstanding – it’s an absolute delight to see the quality of the work they’re doing.”

In fact, there’s such focus on what goes wrong, that what is often forgotten is all the things that have gone exceptionally well.

As we round up our interview, Munro tells me of one council that holds serious success reviews to highlight excellent practice in cases.

“I wish we had a library of that. We should do more celebrating. Social workers are often modest and don’t want to say, ‘I did this’, but they should.”

Three councils have been selected to test giving responsibility for child protection cases to specialist social workers over the next two years.

Dorset, Lincolnshire and Wolverhampton will also trial merging targeted early help with child in need teams within a new family help service, as part of the Department for Education (DfE’s) proposed children’s social care reforms.

The three authorities are the first group of an expected 12 “pathfinders” testing out the families first for children model set out in the DfE’s draft strategy, Stable Homes, Built on Love, issued in February.

Based on the proposals of the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, this would involve:

• Establishing family help services to provide families in need with multidisciplinary support designed to resolve the issues they face without the need for more intervention, reduce stigma and remove the bureaucracy of stepping cases up and down between targeted early help and child in need.
• Enabling practitioners other than social workers to hold child in need cases – as defined by section 17 of the Children Act 1989 – removing the prohibition on them doing so set by statutory safeguarding guidance Working Together to Safeguard Children.
• Having specialist child protection lead practitioners co-work cases with family help teams from the point a local authority initiates a child protection enquiry.

Concerns over safeguarding risks and retention

The reforms are controversial, with the British Association of Social Workers and Ofsted having raised concerns about the safeguarding risks arising from removing the requirement for social workers to hold child in need cases.

Meanwhile, both Ofsted and the Association of Directors of Children’s Services have voiced misgivings about the impact of the lead child protection practitioner role on social work retention, in the context of mounting vacancy rates in local authority children’s services.

In its response to Stable Homes, Built on Love, the ADCS said social workers had shared concerns about “the high stakes nature of such a role, particularly if a tragedy sadly occurs”.

“High end child protection work is hard to sustain over long periods of time, it is emotionally taxing and there are few guarantees it will result in practitioners staying in frontline practice,” it added.

The three pathfinder authorities are all rated good (Dorset and Wolverhampton) or outstanding (Lincolnshire) by Ofsted and all have social work vacancy rates below the national average of 20%, as of September 2022, with Dorset’s being 13.8%, Lincolnshire’s 15.6% and Wolverhampton’s 17.6%.

In relation to the number of child protection plans per 10,000 children, as of March 2022, Lincolnshire’s (25.6) was well below the national average of 42.1, Wolverhampton’s was around the England-wide figure (42.3) and Dorset’s was above it (47.7).

Family network pilots

The DfE has also selected seven councils to pilot the use of so-called family network support packages to enable wider family members to step in to prevent children entering the care system when there are risks to them at home. This was also proposed by the care review.

Brighton and Hove, Sunderland, Gateshead and Telford and Wrekin will start their family network pilots this month (July), and Staffordshire, Hartlepool and Hammersmith and Fulham will do so in spring 2024.

The news comes with a recent evaluation having found that using family group conferences (FGCs) – a form of family network decision making – reduced the risk of children going into care 12 months after families entered pre-proceedings.

Meanwhile, councils would be encouraged to refer families to FGCs from early help onwards, under proposed changes to Working Together, which are currently out to consultation.

The 12 families first for children pathfinders and seven family network pilots will receive £45m in funding overall up to March 2025, with £7.8m of this allocated to the latter.

ADCS president John Pearce said the announcement was a “positive step”, but said it was imperative for the learning from the pilots and pathfinders to be shared with the rest of the sector as quickly as possible.

“The earlier we work with, and provide support to, vulnerable children and families to help them overcome the issues they face, and to stay together safely where possible the less impact these challenges will have on their lives but also on society,” said Pearce. “While the investment announced today is welcome, we continue to need a long-term equitable funding solution for children’s services so that all children and families can thrive, wherever they live.”

DfE still looking for regions to test care co-operatives

The department is still looking for two regions to test its plan to regionalise the commissioning of care placements within so-called regional care co-operatives, which would be collectives of local authorities.

RCCs are designed to overcome the challenge of individual councils being too small – and having too few children – to be able to meaningfully shape the services providers offer and ensure that they meet need and are value for money.

The DfE has said that, by operating at much greater scale than councils, RCCs would be much better able to forecast need, and commission sufficient placements, in the right places, to meet it.

It would also be much easier to share learning, good practice and information about the cost and quality of providers between 20 RCCs, compared with 153 councils, improving the quality of commissioning.

However, the ADCS said last month that, while there were “varying degrees of interest in taking up a RCC pathfinder opportunity”, at present, “no region seems to be interested in adopting the approach as outlined by DfE”.

In a separate paper, the association voiced “significant reservations” about the proposal’s capacity to address the challenge of there being insufficient placements of the right kind and quality for children in care.

The association said creating RCCs would be “costly and time consuming” and “may result in a mass exist of providers”, such was the current fragility of the care placements market.

The DfE said the RCC pathfinders would “enable a test and learn approach to find the most effective way of implementing this reform, doing so in conjunction with local government and the children’s social care sector”.

“Little is known” about which social work practice models work best amid “huge variation” in approaches across England’s 153 local authorities.

That was among the messages from Foundations, the new evidence body created from the merger of What Works for Children Social Care (WWCSC) and the Early Intervention Foundation (EIF), which formally started work yesterday.

Evaluating the effectiveness of service and practice models was among five priorities set by Foundations for its work over the next five years, which it said would be dedicated to ensuring “vulnerable children have the foundational relationships they need to thrive in life”.

Assessing practice models

The organisation said it would “run high-quality evaluations of multi-agency and multi-disciplinary services to understand what should be promoted and scaled up”.

This will include continuing WWCSC’s evaluations of the family safeguarding model, pioneered by Hertfordshire Council, family valued, initiated by Leeds, and No Wrong Door, created by North Yorkshire council, with findings due in 2026-27.

All three models were positively appraised by the Department for Education’s innovation programme as safely reducing the number of children entering care, leading the DfE to support their wider rollout, and further evaluation, across 17 councils.

Strengthening the evidence base

While the innovation programme appraisals of the three models were positive, NWD and family valued were only evaluated in relation to their council of origin, and at a relatively early stage of their development.

Family safeguarding had been in place for longer and was studied in relation to five councils, however, there was no control group against which to compare outcomes in the innovation programme study.

By contrast, the WWCSC evaluations being taken forward by Foundations are using a form of randomised controlled trial (RCT) – considered the gold standard for testing the impact of an intervention. Under this approach, authorities have been given different start dates for implementation, with children and families in councils yet to implement acting as control groups for those that already have done so.

WWCSC also took part in a DfE-commissioned evaluation of the strengths-based Signs of Safety model, published in 2021, when the approach was used in some form by two-thirds of English councils. This found “little evidence” that the model lead to better social work practice or reduced risks to children.

Lack of evidence on domestic abuse

Tackling “major weaknesses” in the evidence base for supporting children and families affected by domestic abuse is another of Foundations’ five priorities.

A 2021 EIF report found that, of more than 100 identified programmes designed to support children affected by domestic abuse, less than a third had been evaluated. Of those that had, many studies had methodological weaknesses, including poor study design and small sample sizes, while it also identified an over-reliance on qualitative evidence.

It also found no consensus around the most relevant and appropriate way to measure outcomes, significantly hampering efforts to compare different interventions in terms of their effectiveness.

Foundation said it would seek to identify relevant preventive, perpetrator and victim-survivor programmes to evaluate, and also to build consensus on how best to appraise domestic abuse programmes.

Prioritising support for parents and family networks

Its other priorities are:

• Supporting parenting – with a focus on filling evidence gaps concerning interventions to support parenting in higher risk families and in a child protection context.
• Strengthening family networks – tackling the lack of evidence on how to support family networks to improve outcomes for children, with a focus on family group decision making, kinship care, reunification and contact for children in care.
• Relationships for care-experienced children – addressing the shortage of evidence-based programmes that support relationships for care experienced
  children, given the importance of this for their mental health.

As well as the state of the existing evidence, Foundations said its priorities were selected based on the scale of the problem, the potential to make an impact and the level of policy interest.

Link to DfE reform programme

On the latter point, they align with the DfE’s reform programme for children’s social care, which includes plans to enhance family support, family networks and kinship care and relationships for care-experienced people.

The programme is largely based on last year’s final report from the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, led by Josh MacAlister, who was subsequently appointed executive chair of what would become Foundations.

Launching the organisation yesterday, he said: “Family – in all its forms – is one of the most powerful influencers of children’s outcomes. But there are major gaps in evidence about which approaches and interventions work. That’s why this new organisation will focus on generating high quality and actionable evidence to improve services that support foundational relationships around children.”

Foundations’ five priorities will make up 80% of its work over the next five years and will involve existing studies, as well as new work funded through its core grant from government, which it can use unrestrictedly.

It may also be commissioned to carry out further studies in these areas – such as with the current trials of family safeguarding, family valued and no wrong door – for which it will receive additional project-based funding.

The last few years have seen a plethora of reports about the lack of appropriate placements for children in care and the dire outcomes that have followed.

These include children and young being placed far from loved-ones and social networks, or in unsuitable, and sometimes unlawful, accommodation, and enduring multiple placement breakdowns. Those with the most complex needs have often being the worst affected.

These have been accompanied by concerns about councils facing spiralling costs for such placements and some – particularly large – providers making excessive profits by taking advantage of the shortage of provision and authorities’ lack of choice.

Regional commissioning plan

To tackle these issues, the Department for Education (DfE) has accepted the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care’s recommendation to regionalise placement commissioning, through the establishment of regional care co-operatives (RCCs).

RCCs – of which there would be 20 following implementation – would take over their member councils’ responsibilities for placing children in care, and would be complemented by a national body supporting councils with forecasting demand and the procurement of care from providers.

This function –  recommended by the Competition and Markets Authority in its report last year on the children’s social care market – may be folded into RCCs over time, the DfE suggested in its recently published draft strategy for the sector.

Providing greater scale than councils

RCCs are designed to overcome the challenge of individual councils being too small – and having too few children – to be able to meaningfully shape the services providers offer and ensure that they meet need and are value for money.

The DfE said that, by operating at much greater scale than councils, RCCs, supported by the national body, would be much better able to forecast need, and commission sufficient placements, in the right places, to meet it.

It would also be much easier to share learning, good practice and information about the cost and quality of providers between 20 RCCs, compared with 152 councils, improving the quality of commissioning.

This would reduce excess profit making and improve outcomes for children by making it more likely that they would be in a placement that meets their needs, said the DfE.

Co-operatives to face Ofsted checks

In time, RCCs would be inspected by Ofsted, to hold them to account for providing sufficient, high-quality placements.

As with the rest of their reforms, the DfE is not rushing ahead with implementation, but plans to establish two pathfinder RCCs next year.

But the department is clear that this is the way forward, with the pathfinders designed to shape how RCCs are implemented, not whether.

So what does the evidence say about their prospects?

Mixed history 

Councils working together across regions to commission care placements is nothing new. However, several reports have found issues with these approaches.

A 2015 study by Oxford Brookes University for the DfE identified 35 consortia or partnerships involved in commissioning care placements, encompassing the majority of councils. Most operated framework agreements, which defined service specifications and prices for providers who signed up.

The report found that, while consortia had generated savings for member authorities, both commissioners and providers acknowledged there was considerable scope for improvement. Procurement and monitoring activities were seen as particularly “bureaucratic and wasteful”.

Earlier call to require regional commissioning

A year later, Sir Martin Narey’s independent review of residential care for the DfE found councils could be obtaining “significantly greater savings” through consortia-based commissioning.

Foreshadowing the care review’s recommendations last year, Narey recommended the department require councils “to come together into large consortia for the purpose of obtaining significant discounts from private and voluntary sector providers”.

On the back of this, the department funded two projects, both in London, through its innovation programme, to test the benefits of regional commissioning.

However, an evaluation of one of these projects found that fewer providers than expected had made bids to join its proposed framework agreement, and those that had had offered prices higher than the market rates. Several providers reported that their preference was to offer placements to councils through unplanned spot purchases, where they could set their own fees.

“The findings highlight a tension between the interests of local authorities in securing in-borough, suitable and more cost effective placements, and the business interests of independent placement providers,” found the overarching evaluation of the second round of innovation programme funding, published in 2020.

Lack of provider sign-up

More recently, a 2022 study by What Works for Children’s Social Care found that, while most councils were part of a regional or sub-regional commissioning framework, several said these did not help them secure local placements or reduce reliance on spot purchasing. As with the innovation programme project, the key issue was lack of provider sign-up.

And in its report on social care last year, the CMA found that councils “can struggle to collaborate successfully due to risk aversion, budgetary constraints, differences in governance, and difficulties aligning priorities and sharing costs”. It concluded this was unlikely to change without action by central government.

One clear difference between RCCs and their predecessor regional commissioning initiatives is that they would be mandatory and universal, following their rollout. Neither councils, nor providers, would be able to opt out, and providers would have to deal with the RCC as a whole, not individual authorities.

This should tackle at least some of the issues highlighted in past reports.

Several years until full implementation

However, with the two RCC pathfinders only due to start work in spring 2024 and legislation required to roll out the system to the rest of the country, full implementation is several years away. Several sector bodies have raised the question of how immediate placement pressures will be addressed in the meantime.

While supporting the pathfinder approach to RCCs, the Local Government Association said: “We do not believe that RCCs will be able to address the issue of insufficient placements quickly, particularly for those children with the most complex needs, and therefore call on the department to work with councils and the NHS to improve sufficiency swiftly rather than waiting for RCCs to deliver results.

“This is imperative; too many children are not living in the right home for their needs and those children cannot wait for action to be taken.”

Proposals unlikely to tackle ‘dysfunctional market’

Children’s charity representative body Children England questioned what action would be taken in relation to non-pathfinder areas over the coming years.

“The fact that selected areas will be able to voluntarily form RCCs, and will receive both set-up and capital resource from central government to do so, while so many other areas of the country won’t, simply cannot be described as a decisive intervention to reform the whole dysfunctional care market,” it said.

Fostering agency TACT, meanwhile, while supportive of RCCs as an idea, raised concerns that the pathfinders may come to nothing.

“Any pilots must be part of a wider plan that clearly signals when the legislation needed to enact RCCs more widely will be introduced,” it said. “Too many pilots peter out, implementing pathfinders does make sense, but must be part of a wider implementation plan that makes clear the direction of travel and timescales for this.”

More immediate measures to boost placements

The DfE said it recognised the urgency of the need to tackle the insufficiency of placements.

Its key measures prior to RCC implementation are the existing programme to invest £259m in building children’s homes, from 2022-25, and a £27m increase for foster care recruitment and retention, over the next two years.

“This will boost fostering capacity and build an evidence base on how to effectively recruit and retain foster carers, building towards fostering being subsumed into RCCs across England,” it said.

Whether these measures prove sufficient is open to question; they will also take time to have an effect on the supply of placements.

However, besides timescales, there are more fundamental criticisms of RCCs.

Concerns over remote decision making for children

The DfE’s view is that RCCs’ greater ability to shape the market would result in more children being placed closer to home.

“No matter where children are from, at the heart of this approach, it is crucial that children live close to their family, friends and school,” it said. “A regional way of working should improve, not impede, this.”

When they were first proposed by the care review, the LGA warned about decision-making becoming more remote from children’s needs as a result.

“Locally-led solutions, rather than structures imposed from above, allow councils to build on existing relationships and respond to local contexts,” it said.

In a statement following the publication of the DfE strategy, it reiterated warnings about RCCs “adding an additional layer of bureaucracy to the system”.

Similar concerns were raised in December by some members of the care review’s evidence group, a collective of academics and researchers whose remit was to advise on the evidence base for its recommendations.

Warnings over structural change

In a blog post, they warned that “care will need to be taken that these structural reforms do not dilute local accountability mechanisms”.

The group also pointed to the risks inherent in structural change more generally, stressing the need to ensure RCCs do not become “an expensive distraction”.

A model for this sort of change is provided by the creation of regional adoption agencies (RAAs) over the past seven years.

Precedent of regional adoption agencies

In their blog post, the care review evidence group members pointed to the 2022 evaluation of the creation of RAAs, which identified a “complicated picture” in terms of their impact.

It found that RAAs appeared to have sped up the time taken to place a child for adoption, relative to performance by councils who were then outside regional structures.

However there had been a decrease in the percentage of children with a placement order who were subsequently placed with an adoptive family, relative to local authority-led adoption services. The creation of RAAs, it said, had caused “short-term disruption” that had slowed down adopter recruitment, though this factor had receded over time.

The Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies (CVAA) said it was “extremely concerned” about the plan for RCCs on the basis of the experience of implementing RAAs.

Risks of ‘loss of valuable expertise’

In its response to the care review, it said that “one of the most concerning consequences of the RAA programme has been the removal of adoption expertise from LA social work teams into RAAs, which may be a significant factor in why fewer children are having adoption chosen as their permanency plan”.

“There is a serious risk of RCCs following the same route as RAAs, and therefore compounding the loss of valuable expertise from their care planning teams, without an explicit plan to avoid this happening,” it added.

On behalf of independent fostering agencies, the Nationwide Association of Fostering Providers (NAFP) also called for lessons to be learned from the implementation of RAAs in any rollout of RCCs.

However, it voiced support, in principle, for the change.

“Every local authority operates in different ways, even within regional consortia, and this over-complicates commissioning and introduces bureaucracy,” said NAFP. “[Choosing] from a wider range of placement options, with better matching, will contribute to better outcomes for children. We welcome the opportunity to be a part of establishing objectives and evaluation for the RCC pilots.”

Pledge to work with sector on implementation

The DfE appears to have recognised that the RCC idea is not universally loved, and is aiming to take the sector with it as it takes it forward.

It said it recognised “the wide variety of views on how RCCs could operate, including those of local authorities, placement providers, foster carers and social workers”. The department pledged to work with the sector to understand how RCCs should work and how they fit into wider plans to deliver sustainable and safe places to live for children in care”.

Contributions are coming in already, for example, from the National Centre for Excellence in Residential Child Care, which last week produced a proposed service specification for RCCs.

The DfE will be accepting responses to its consultation on the proposals until 11 May 2023. You can contribute here.

The government has pledged action to tackle “excessive” workload pressures on council children’s social workers as part of its response to the care review.

The Department for Education said it would set up a national workload action group to identify solutions to “unnecessary” pressures on practitioners, while also promising steps to reduce the burden of case recording and free social workers from some case work with children in need.

The proposals were set out in Stable Homes, Built on Love, its draft children’s social care strategy, which was published last week for consultation and is, in the main, a response to the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care.

The DfE said its ambitions were to have “an excellent social worker for every child and family who needs one” and for children and families to “expect to build a trusting relationship with their social worker and feel confident they understand their needs and are working in their best interests”.

Social workers ‘do not always feel valued’

However, it said its ability to achieve these aims was constrained by significant retention challenges among social workers and a workforce that “did not always feel supported, valued and trusted”.

The challenges are manifest in the fact that almost one in five (19%) children’s social worker posts in councils lay vacant as of June 2022, up from 14.6% a year earlier, according to an Association of Directors of Children’s Services survey.

At the same time, DfE research has found social workers reporting increasing stress and workloads, between 2018 and 2021, while Ofsted has warned that increasing staff shortages were making an already challenging job “unsustainable” for some.

The DfE said the workload action group would be set up shortly and include representatives from Ofsted, the British Association of Social Workers (BASW), UNISON, the ADCS and the Principal Children and Families Social Worker Network, along with people with lived experience of children’s social care.

Tackling ‘unnecessary’ pressures

“It will be asked to identify and address unnecessary workload pressures that do not lead to improvements in outcomes for children and families, to diagnose the issues driving them and to develop solutions,” the department said.

The department said improvements in case management systems (CMS) were needed to enable more direct work and reduce workload pressures on practitioners.

It said it would work with councils to identify shared aims for CMS, solutions that could be used across the sector and the most efficient way of procuring these from suppliers, including by working across children’s and adults’ services.

This could include councils joining together to commission CMS, with the DfE saying existing issues were, in part, caused by “152 local authorities individually commissioning a small number of providers without setting a clear shared direction on improvements”.

In addition, the DfE will fund two groups of councils to test how case recording requirements on social workers could be reduced.

Employers to share good practice on retention

It said it would also encourage employers to share good practice on retaining practitioners, through the creation of a virtual hub this year or next.

“It will contain resources to improve working conditions, including health, wellbeing and improving organisational culture, as well as data and information on agency use and pay,” it said. “The virtual hub will also include best practice resources on flexible working.”

The DfE also pledged to “enhance” the annual social work health check – the survey of practitioners across England on their working conditions – though it did not provide details on how this would happen.

The department added that social workers would be freed up to spend more time with children and families by the creation of multidisciplinary family help teams, which will be tested in up to 12 pathfinder areas.

Removing child in need caseholding requirement

As proposed by the care review, these teams would take responsibility for what are currently targeted early help and child in need services.

As part of this, the DfE said it wanted to amend Working Together to Safeguard Children to remove the requirements for social workers to lead assessments of children under section 17 and subsequent child in need planning.

In an initial response to the strategy, the BASW England said it did “not reveal a clear and funded plan on how to retain social workers in the children’s care system and ensure their working conditions are fit for their role”.

It added: “The message from social workers is clear: high caseloads and complex cases increasing demand on the system has led to this crisis. The failure to address this sufficiently is concerning and a risk to vulnerable children and families.

‘Nothing to address calls for action on pay and conditions’

“While extra funds for the recruitment of 500 children’s social care apprentices is positive, there seems nothing here to address the wishes of experienced social workers for a national review of their pay, terms, and working conditions to make sure the profession is properly supported.”

UNISON, which represents an estimated 40,000 social workers across the UK, was also critical of the proposals.

“Social services departments are in desperate need of more social workers, and are losing overworked staff all the time,” said head of local government Mike Short.

“Without an urgent intervention from ministers, the current workforce will be unable to make much of a difference to all the families needing support.”

In its response to the DfE’s separate proposals on introducing national rules to reduce the cost and use of locum social workers, the ADCS also called for more action from the department on recruitment and retention.

“Whilst this announcement is a positive step, we also need to see bold efforts from government to tackle the recruitment and retention crisis we all face in public services,” said ADCS president Steve Crocker.

“There are multiple factors at play, from the cost-of-living crisis offset against a backdrop of annual public sector pay freezes and more children and families coming into contact with children’s services. We must promote the value of this transformative profession and the lasting impact this can have on children and families.”

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The Department for Education (DfE) has backed a care review proposal for a five-year early career framework (ECF) for the development of children’s social workers, but rejected its call to introduce national pay scales to recognise progress.

The ECF would provide newly qualified local authority children’s social workers with two years of “high-quality support and development” that would replace the existing 12-month assessed and supported year in employment (ASYE).

In years three to five of the ECF, social workers would be supported to become “expert practitioners”, which the DfE said would create “a cohort of highly trained social workers capable of dealing with the most complex cases and spreading best practice”.

The ECF will be tested by a group of early adopter councils from this year with a view to it becoming an entitlement from September 2026.

In setting out the proposals in its children’s social care strategy, issued for consultation last week, the DfE has accepted the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care’s recommendation to introduce an ECF to boost social worker skills, knowledge, career development and retention.

National pay scales rejected

The care review said the ECF should be complemented by national pay scales, which would be tied to progression through the framework.

In its final report last year, the review, led by ex-Frontline chief executive Josh MacAlister, said the scales would “better recognise and reward the development of expertise”, while preventing councils from competing each other for practitioners on the basis of pay.

However, the DfE has rejected national pay scales on the grounds that they risked destabilising existing pay arrangements, which, in most cases, are set by individual councils in line with a national framework negotiated by employers and unions.

“Local government already has a national pay spine which includes job descriptions and grading for child and family social workers to help achieve consistency, transparency and fairness in pay and progression,” the DfE said.

“We do not intend to create new DfE-led pay scales. Nationalising child and family social worker pay and removing a subsection of council employees from local government pay and conditions may be destabilising to councils without having the desired effects.”

DfE wants ‘fairer’ pay

In its separate consultation on measures to reduce the use and cost of agency children’s social in local authorities, the department said it wanted to see “greater national consistency and fairness around pay” for practitioners doing the same role in different councils, whether agency or employed.

This would underpin its moves to place a national cap on council payments to agencies in a way that would reduce locum pay to the level of the average for practitioners doing the same role on an employed basis, once benefits such as holiday and pensions are taken into account.

In its consultation on the strategy, the DfE said that it wanted to explore how councils could recognise progression through the ECF using existing local government pay scales.

To achieve this, it said it would “work with the sector to ensure that current pay rates, job descriptions and grading reflect the challenge of the role and career progression”, and also “look to improve the quality of pay data”, though there are no details as yet on how this process will work.

Framework to be ‘based on key social work skills’

The DfE said the ECF would be based on a framework document “setting out the detailed, comprehensive skills and knowledge needed to support and protect vulnerable children, families and carers at both practitioner and expert practitioner levels”.

This would build on the existing post-qualifying standards for child and family social work (formerly the knowledge and skills statement), last updated in 2018, but also be tied to the proposed national framework setting out what the DfE expects of local authorities in children’s services.

The framework, recommended by the care review, was also issued for consultation last week, proposing four overarching outcomes councils should be aiming to achieve, two “enablers” to support them in doing so and a set of indicators tied to each.

The ECF will also be informed by a set of practice guides, also as recommended by the care review. The DfE said these would “set out what is known from current evidence and practice expertise about how best to achieve the outcomes and deliver against the expectations of the national framework”.

Practice group appointed to develop guidance

The development of the guides and the ECF will be overseen by the children’s social care national practice group, which was set up in October 2022, helped produce the national framework and was also recommended by the care review.

A 16-strong body chaired by chief social worker for children and families Isabelle Trowler and including 13 leaders from local government, national bodies, health, police and schools and two care experienced people, it currently includes no frontline practitioners or social work representatives.

The DfE said it would work with early adopter local authorities to identify the balance between national consistency and local flexibility in the training delivered to social workers on the ECF. It suggested at least some of the programme would be provided by a national training body commissioned by the DfE, with the rest delivered by councils with funding from the department.

With practitioners likely to be assessed at the end of years two and five of the ECF, the DfE said it would design “rigorous, supportive and fair assessment processes, which are integrated into the development and training aspects of the programme”.

In doing so, it said it would learn the lessons of the national assessment and accreditation system (NAAS), introduced in 2018 to test social workers’ knowledge and skills and accredit those who passed, but scrapped last year.

NAAS was delivered through in-person assessment centres and, in bringing the scheme to an end, the DfE said it wanted to move towards a “more sustainable” system, likely involving more remote methods of assessment.

Reserving tasks for expert practitioners

While the DfE has accepted many of the care review’s recommendations in relation to the ECF, it is not clear whether it will take up its proposal to reserve certain social work tasks to those who have become expert practitioners through completing the framework.

Specifically, the review proposed that child protection cases should be managed by expert practitioners, selected based on their experience to date or, in future, through passing the ECF.

“They would provide an experienced and specialist resource to investigate and make decisions about significant harm to children,” said the review.

The DfE has proposed testing the deployment of lead child protection practitioners to manage cases in up to 12 ‘family first for children’ pathfinder areas.

It said they would “have the specific practice skills and experience that social workers need to work directly with families where there is actual or likely significant harm”, but did not specify how they would be appointed or make a link to them having passed the ECF in future, should both initiatives come into force.

On 2 February 2023, the Department for Education issued its response to the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s inquiry into the murders of Star Hobson and Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and the Competition and Markets Authority’s study of the children’s social care market, in three consultation documents:

• An overarching strategy, Stable Homes, Built on Love. 
• A report proposing reforms to agency social work.
• A proposed national framework, setting standards and outcomes for children’s services.

The consultations close on 11 May, 2023. You can respond online by following the links above. To help you, we’ve set out the key points below.