Child in need assessments have been opened up to non-social work qualified staff despite concerns that the policy will increase risks to children.

The Department for Education’s (DfE) revised version of Working Together to Safeguard Children has removed the previous requirement for child in need assessments to be reserved for qualified social workers.

Under the new 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.

Child protection enquiries and casework will remain ring-fenced for social workers.

Case for opening up child in need role

In its consultation on the plans, the DfE suggested this would enable staff already working with families – including family support workers, drug and alcohol practitioners, domestic abuse workers and youth workers – to take on the lead practitioner role.

The move is designed to provide local authorities with more flexibility in how they support families and also reflects the Children Act 1989, which does not stipulate that social workers should hold child in need cases under section 17.

In addition, it foreshadows the DfE’s plan to merge targeted early help and child in need provision as part of its children’s social care reforms. This move, recommended by the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, is designed to reduce the need for families to be transferred between teams and provide those with children in need with a less stigmatising response.

However, while the plans were backed by the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, both Ofsted and the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) raised concerns they would undermine the quality of practice and increase risks to children.

With existing early help staff likely to be among those taking on child in need cases, Ofsted and fellow inspectorates have warned that some of these practitioners were already holding cases  “above a level that they felt was appropriate for them”.

Split response to having non-social work case-holders

This split was evident in responses to the DfE’s consultation on the plans, the results of which were published last month.

Of about 1,000 respondents, 36% said they believed the changes would improve outcomes for children and families supported under section 17, while 38% disagreed.

And though 30% felt the role of social work qualified supervisor or manager would ensure appropriate social work oversight, 35% rejected this.

Supporters of the plan said it would increase flexibility in the delivery of support and enable councils to deploy practitioners with the right skills and relationships with families in the casework role.

However, detractors warned that harms could be missed where social workers were not the lead practitioner or, alternatively, cases may unnecessarily be escalated to child protection to ensure social work oversight.

Others raised concerns about how lead practitioners would be overseen by social work qualified managers, particularly when case-holders were based outside the local authority.

DfE presses ahead but tightens guidance

Though it has decided to press ahead with the policy, the DfE has made changes to the draft guidance to strengthen the expectations on councils to ensure appropriate oversight of cases held by non-social workers. It also stressed that it expected social workers to be lead practitioners for many child in need cases.

The revised guidance states that:

• The lead practitioner should have the skills, knowledge, competence, and experience to work effectively with the child and their family.
• The required skills, knowledge, competence, and experience, and how these will be monitored locally, should be set out in local assessment protocols.
• The protocols should also define who can act as a lead practitioner under section 17, and set out the process for the allocation of lead practitioners, accountability for cases and auditing.

In line with the draft guidance, the revised Working Together states that the social work qualified manager or supervisor’s role encompasses:

• agreeing with partners who the most appropriate lead practitioner should be and allocating the case to them;
• approving the lead practitioner’s assessment;
• reviewing and approving the plan for the child;
• meeting families and attending home visits where appropriate.

As statutory guidance, councils and relevant partners may only depart from Working Together for legally defensible reasons and not to a substantial degree.

Revised guidance on disabled children’s assessments

The DfE has also strengthened guidance on the assessment of disabled children and their families after this was backed by two-thirds of respondents.

While the previous version of Working Together simply set out councils’ legal duties around providing support to disabled children and their carers, the redraft sets out the value of providing this support.

It says practitioners’ assessments should be strengths-based and inform decisions on the help needed for the child to achieve the best possible outcomes, enable the family to continue caring for them where right for the child and ensure practical support to enable them to thrive.

However, while not proposed in the consultation, the revised Working Together also states assessments should inform decision making around safeguarding children where there is abuse, neglect or exploitation.

Though many parent respondents to the consultation stated that assessments of disabled children and their families were too safeguarding-focused currently, others highlighted these children’s vulnerability and the need for staff to “adopt a safeguarding lens when appropriate”.

Designated social care officer role (DSCO) promoted

The revised guidance also encourages councils to appoint designated social care officers (DCSOs), senior social work leads for special educational needs and disability provision (SEND).

The role is designed to oversee social care’s contribution to SEND provision, such as education, health and care assessments, plans and reviews, as well as strategic planning of services for disabled children, such as short breaks.

As of last March, just over 40 councils had a DCSO in place or were recruiting to the position, according to the Council for Disabled Children.

These changes to Working Together’ comes with the government having asked the Law Commission to review the “patchwork of outdated legislation for disabled children” and advise on how it can be simplified and streamlined.

The commission started its review in October 2023.

Transferring child in need cases to non-social workers may undermine the quality of practice and increase risks to children, Ofsted and the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) have warned.

The organisations raised the concerns in response to Department for Education (DfE) proposals to remove the requirement for social workers to carry out hold child in need assessments, under section 17 of the Children Act 1989.

Under the plans, set out in the DfE’s draft children’s social care strategy, Stable Homes, Built on Love, a broader range of practitioners’ – potentially including family support, drug and alcohol, domestic abuse or mental health workers – would also be able to carry out child in need assessments.

Merger of child in need and targeted early help

The changes are part of a wider planned reform, to merge targeted early help and child in need services under a new ‘family help’ function.

The DfE, following the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, has said this would avoid families having to be transferred between teams and provide those with children in need with a more supportive, less stigmatising and less safeguarding-orientated service than was currently the case.

Where families needed a child protection response, a specialist child protection practitioner – who would be a social worker – would co-work the case with the family help team, though the two functions would be kept separate under the plans.

The proposals will be tested in 12 areas over the next two years before being rolled out nationally, though the change to case-holding for child in need cases will come into force beforehand.

The current requirement for social workers to carry out child in need assessments is set out in Working Together to Safeguard Children, which the DfE is currently consulting on revising, including to remove this stipulation.

Ofsted concerns over shifting cases from social workers

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In its response to Stable Homes, Built on Love, published last week, Ofsted raised concerns about non-social workers taking on child in need cases.

It said that “some of most skilled and complex work to help families and protect children” its inspectors saw [was] with children in need, and the distinction between this and child protection was “not easily drawn” because of the dynamic nature of families’ needs and risks.

As a result, staff in future family help services would “need to be skilled and experienced to understand and recognise when risks escalate”, which was a “core social work skill”.

“Lead professionals who are not qualified social workers are likely to need more support and/or oversight to identify these risks,” it added. “We know that some local authorities can manage this well, but we have also seen in some poorly performing local authorities that a lack of social work oversight and an emphasis on support can lead to a more adult focused approach and miss the needs and risks to the child.”

“It would be dangerous if specialist skills and awareness are lost across family help.”

BASW warning over ‘deprivation of right to social work support’

BASW England issued a similar message in its response to Stable Homes, Built on Love.

“It is right that every area in England should provide the same level of supportive and welcoming family help service, and that multi-agency working should be promoted,” it said. “However, concerns remain as to how roles will be defined within such teams.

“Children in need should not be deprived of their right to section 17 provision through restructuring of services, nor should they be deprived of the right to qualified social workers who can assess and meet their needs.”

BASW England added: “The social work role is critical to delivery of good care and is highly skilled and must not be diluted by sharing safeguarding-specific tasks amongst professionals with limited or no background in this area.”

DfE recognises concerns

In its consultation on Working Together, the DfE acknowledged the concerns around permitting local authorities to allocate child in need assessments to practitioners from a range of backgrounds, particularly the risk of these decisions being driven by resources.

It has also stipulated that so-called ‘lead practitioners’ carrying out child in need assessments must do so under the oversight of a social work-qualified practice supervisor and manager, who would allocate the case based on who was best placed to work with the family in question.

“Furthermore, those local authorities who do not want to pursue using a wider range of practitioners working on section 17 cases do not need to – this just gives those areas permission to use non-social worker practitioners where they have the knowledge, skills and capacity commensurate with the level of need,” it added.

It is not clear how far the measures set out in the Working Together consultation – particularly the requirement for lead practitioners to be overseen by a social work-qualified supervisor – will allay Ofsted and BASW’s concerns.

A spokesperson for the inspectorate said of the Working Together consultation: “This is a very important piece of statutory guidance which sets out the expectations for how all agencies should play their part in helping and protecting children. We are currently considering the proposals to update this guidance so that we can provide constructive advice about the changes.”

ADCS backs government approach

John Pearce, ADCS president, 2023-24

The DfE’s approach was backed by the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS), whose president, John Pearce, told Community Care: “We clearly don’t want to be moving to a position where non-qualified staff or alternatively-qualified staff are holding case where they are not able to support children families effectively.

“We’ll need to be really clear about the framework around that and which cases will continue to be held by a qualified social worker and which will be held by a family support worker or another worker who has not got qualified social worker status.”

He said the approach proposed by the DfE was in line with section 17 of the Children Act 1989, which does not specify that assessments should be carried out by social workers.

However, Pearce added: “It has to be about the right support for the family than a resource-driven job.”

Allocating cases to social work apprentices

Pearce said that one option he favoured would be for councils to allocate social work apprentices, who undertake their qualification while working in a substantive role for their sponsoring employer, for example, as family support workers.

“They are a cohort we can grow, develop and provide high-quality training to, and that would follow through into social work and help with the longer-term sufficiency issues,” he said. “There’s a latent pool of talent we could bring into the social work profession through that route.”

In Stable Homes, Built on Love, the DfE said it wanted to recruit an extra 500 child and family social work apprentices each year, but provided no detail on how this would be realised.

The Department for Education has proposed far-reaching changes to social workers’ roles under Working Together to Safeguard Children, its guidance on services for children in need of help and protection in England.

The revisions are a key plank of the DfE’s proposed reforms to children’s social care, articulated in its draft strategy, Stable Homes, Built on Love, published in February.

As statutory guidance, relevant agencies and practitioners – including local authorities and their social workers – must comply with Working Together unless exceptional circumstances arise.

Here’s a summary of the main changes for practitioners.

From social workers to lead practitioners 

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The current Working Together, which mostly dates from 2018, is a very social work-focused document, mentioning the term ‘social worker’ 63 times. The vast majority of these references are to roles and responsibilities that the DfE expects social workers, uniquely, to carry out.

By contrast, the proposed update to the guidance mentions ‘social worker’ just 23 times.

Those lost references to social workers have been replaced by the concept of the ‘lead practitioner’, mentioned just six times in the current version but 32 in its proposed replacement.

Under the proposed revisions, ‘lead practitioner’ would become the generic term for the case-holder across all areas of intervention: early help, targeted early help, child in need and child protection.

The 2018 Working Together requires both child protection and child in need cases to be held by social workers.

The revised version would only mandate this in child protection cases; child in need cases could be held by lead practitioners from a range of backgrounds.

The consultation document on the changes suggests that alternatively qualified practitioners could include family support workers, drug and alcohol practitioners, domestic
abuse workers and youth workers.

However, crucially, cases would be overseen by ‘a social work qualified practice supervisor or manager’ (see below).

Rationale for child in need reform

Care review lead Josh MacAlister

The removal of the requirement for social workers to hold child in need cases was a direct recommendation from last year’s final report of the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, led by Josh MacAlister.

It was tied to its broader proposal – also accepted by the DfE – to merge targeted early help with child in need services under a new ‘family help’ function.

This was designed to capture the original intention of section 17, to “safeguard and promote the welfare” of children who are unlikely to reach or maintain “a reasonable standard of health or development” without support.

This meant it was designed for families with a broad range of needs, not just those with high need whose children tend to be classified as being in need; as such, it was appropriate for practitioners other than social workers to take the lead in some cases, particularly as they may already have developed relationships with the family.

The DfE has accepted this, saying in its Working Together document: “We want to ensure the right people, with the right knowledge, skills and relationships, provide families with support at the right time, whilst keeping children’s safety and wellbeing at the centre of decision-making, planning and the provision of services.”

The latter point is captured by the requirement that social work-qualified supervisors or managers allocate and oversee the case – again as recommended by the care review – while the DfE also stresses that local authorities may stick to the status quo and reserve child in need cases for social workers.

Early help changes

The full implementation of the family help model is a few years away. Three pathfinder areas will start testing the approach later this year, with a further nine to follow next year, so Working Together will need to be further revised at the point of full implementation across England.

The current proposals are designed to “lay the foundations for this future system”, the DfE says. Besides the change to child in need case-holding, this includes proposed revisions to the guidance in Working Together on early help, including:

• Extending the groups of children who may have a potential need for early help to include those viewing problematic and/or inappropriate online content or developing inappropriate relationships online, those missing education and those who are at risk of school exclusion.
• Stating that early help assessments take account of the needs of all members of the family as individuals and consider how their needs impact on one another.
• Specifying that such assessments should also provide the basis for any future assessments if they are needed, for example, under sections 17 or 47 of the Children Act.
• Stating that social workers may be the ‘lead practitioner’ in early help cases, contrary to the current version of the guidance, which lists GPs, family support workers, school nurses, teachers, health visitors and special educational needs co-ordinators as possible case leads.

Increasing the use of family group conferences

Photo: zinkevych/Fotolia

Drawing on the care review, Stable Homes, Built on Love seeks to increase the role of family networks in supporting children to stay with their parents, providing care where they cannot and in making decisions about what should happen earlier than is currently the case, including through family group conferences (FGCs).

Currently, Working Together makes no reference to FGCs. They are referenced in separate statutory guidance on court orders and pre-proceedings, which states that councils should involve wider family members in decision making where there are child protection concerns, including through considering referral to an FGC.

However, in line with Stable Homes, the draft revised Working Together would promote the use of FGCs from early help onwards.

“Local authorities should consider referring the family to a family group conference service if they believe there is a possibility the child may not be able to remain with their parents/carers, or in any event before a child becomes looked after, unless this would be a risk to the child,” the draft version states.

“They should be a family-led forum, where a family network has all the resources, adequate preparation, relevant information, a safe and appropriate environment, and ‘private family time’ to make a plan to respond to concerns about a child’s safety or wellbeing.”

National child protection standards

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In relation to child protection cases, there would be no change to the status quo on case-holding under the draft revised Working Together, which states that the ‘lead practitioner’ for section 47 enquiries must be a social worker.

One change it would introduce would be a set of national multi-agency child protection standards, in response to a recommendation from last year’s Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s report into the murders of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson.

That inquiry identified a disconnect between the seriousness of the state’s child protection responsibilities and the lack of standards on how to do it, in the context of the serious failings it found in both Arthur’s and Star’s cases. It said national standards would also give practitioners from different agencies a common framework from which to operate.

In its consultation document on revising Working Together, the DfE said these standards “set out the actions, considerations and behaviours that should lead to improved child protection practice and better outcomes for children”, and were based on “best practice evidence”.

While some are for all practitioners coming into contact with children, the majority are for those directly involved in child protection work (see below).

Have your say

The consultation on the revised Working Together runs until 6 September 2023.

You can respond by answering this online survey or emailing workingtogether2023.consultation@education.gov.uk