The Department for Education (DfE) is to quiz councils on the balance of social workers and alternatively qualified practitioners in family help teams, which authorities are expected to roll out over the next year.

The requirement to provide this information is likely to be included in conditions set by the DfE for councils’ use of the £270m children’s social care prevention grant in 2025-26.

A core purpose of the grant is the rollout of family help, which involves merging existing targeted early help and child in need services into multidisciplinary teams including social workers, family support staff and practitioners from disciplines such as substance misuse or domestic abuse.

Under the approach, any of these professionals could take on the role of “lead practitioner” in working with families who need targeted early help or whose children have been deemed to be in need.

Removal of social work requirement for child in need assessments

While councils had previously been required, under Working Together to Safeguard Children, to allocate child in need assessments to social workers, this requirement was removed by 2023 revisions to the statutory guidance.

Under the current policy, staff, including those outside of the local authority, will be able to take on the role, now termed ‘lead practitioner’, under the oversight of a social work qualified manager or practice supervisor.

The approach of allocating assessments and cases to any of a range of practitioners is being trialled by the 10 families first for children pathfinder areas. These local areas are testing elements of the previous Conservative government’s children’s social care reforms that are being continued by its Labour successor.

Besides family help, the pathfinder includes creating multi-agency child protection teams and involving family networks in decisions about children’s care when families are struggling, including by providing financial support packages to help keep children safe at home.

Duties to set up multi-agency teams and offer family meetings

These reforms are being partly implemented through the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which will require councils, police and health partners to set up the multi-agency teams and oblige local authorities to offer parents a family group decision making (FGDM) meeting when considering issuing care proceedings in relation to their children.

They will also be put into effect nationally through the children’s social care prevention grant, in relation to which the government issued draft guidance this week.

This said the grant was ring-fenced for “the implementation of family help and child protection reforms” and the implementation of the FGDM duty.

Supporting families ‘to overcome challenges early’

Funding should be used “across the full breadth of preventative services, including early help, family help, family networks and child protection,” said the draft guidance. “These should support families to overcome challenges at the earliest opportunity, prevent escalation and effectively intervene with high-risk problems.”

Councils should use the funding in tandem with the £253m allocated in 2025-26 to the Supporting Families programme – under which a key worker is allocated to support families with multiple needs – in investing in family help and other preventive support. Though this money has been rolled into a broader children and families grant, worth £414m, only the Supporting Families money should be used as part of the family help rollout.

The government said some of the children’s social care prevention grant – potentially about 30% – should be used on the design and transformation of services, rather than their delivery. As part of this, councils must appoint a named lead responsible for running the programme, along with a senior practice lead, whose role would include practice and cultural change.

Short- and medium-term objectives

The draft guidance said councils should, through the use of the grant, see progress against a set of short- and medium-term objectives.

It said the short-term goals were:

• Professionals and agencies understanding their new roles and responsibilities and how to work together effectively.
• Improved staff knowledge of, and confidence in providing, effective support for children and families.
• Families having an improved understanding of the services and support available to them.
• Families feeling more involved in the design of services.

The medium-term objectives listed were:

• Improved experiences for children and families, including improved relationships and trust with services, families receiving the right support at the right time and wider family networks being involved earlier.
• Services better meeting the needs of children and families.
• Improved decision making and case management.
• Improved information and data sharing between professionals and agencies.

Reporting requirements

The draft guidance said councils would need to report regularly to the DfE to provide assurance they were meeting the objectives. This would include the quarterly collection of data, including:

• Detail on the family help workforce, for example, the number of social work-qualified and alternatively qualified workers and the number of local authority and non-local authority employed practitioners.
• Information on the children benefiting from family help and child protection services, for example, the numbers receiving family help.
• The number of FGDM meetings offered prior to or at the letter before proceedings to parents or those with parental responsibility and the number of meetings facilitated after the offer is made.

In setting out the local government finance settlement this week, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) said councils should use the draft guidance to support their financial planning for 2025-26. Final guidance is likely to be issued shortly.

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The families first for children (FFC) model currently being tested in 10 areas is set to be rolled out to all local authorities, the chief social worker for children and families has said.

The planned nationwide expansion of the approach – which involves enhancing early help for families, involving family networks more in decision making and establishing specialist child protection teams – was revealed by Isabelle Trowler in a post on LinkedIn.

She was responding to a post on the launch of the FFC ‘pathfinder’ – the term used to describe the testing of the model – in the London Borough of Redbridge, one of the ten testbed areas.

Approach ‘set to be rolled out across all local authorities’

“Another launch of the pathfinders – now set to be rolled out across all local authorities and with new £££ on the table too,” she said. “The pathfinders are coming up with great design ideas about changing how we work with families – more help for families, greater protection for children.

Her post puts flesh on the bone of the government’s announcement of a £250m children’s social care prevention grant for councils in 2025-26 in a local government finance policy statement issued last month.

“This new grant will lay the groundwork for children’s social care reform, enabling direct investment in additional prevention activity through transition to family help,” said the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), in the statement.

The introduction of family help – one part of four FFC elements – was the key recommendation of the 2021-22 Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, led by now Labour MP Josh MacAlister.

Family help the key recommendation from care review

He called on the then Conservative government to invest £2bn in the approach over four years which, along with other measures, would mean that the care population was 30,000 lower in 10 years than would otherwise have been the case, MacAlister claimed.

However, the Conservatives instead decided to test the approach from 2023-25, backed by about £37m, through the FFC pathfinder.

This prompted criticisms from both MacAlister and children’s charities that delaying reform would be costly to both children and the public finances.

The Conservatives also commissioned a five-year evaluation of FFC, which is being carried out by the National Children’s Bureau and research bodies Verian and Alma Economics.

Existing Labour pledges 

The Labour government has already pledged to implement the other elements of FFC besides family help, in a policy paper, Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive, published in November 2024.

It promised to legislate to require councils to set up multi-agency safeguarding teams, involving representation from the police, health and education, to investigate child protection concerns and manage cases.

The DfE said the details of how the teams would work would be shaped by the evaluation of FFC.

It also pledged to mandate councils to offer families in pre-proceedings a family group decision making (FGDM) meeting, enabling them to be involved in decisions about their children’s future, where this is in the child’s best interests.

Thirdly, it said it would legislate to require representation from education in local safeguarding arrangements, at strategic and operational levels.

Children’s Wellbeing Bill

These measures will likely be included in the forthcoming Children’s Wellbeing Bill.

Further details of the rollout of family help will likely be set out when information is published about how councils should use the children’s social care prevention grant in 2025-26.

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.

The government has vowed to continue with work initiated by its predecessor to tackle workloads among local authority children’s social workers.

The Labour administration has also indicated it will continue reforms started by the Conservatives to improve early help for families and boost the recruitment of foster carers.

In the House of Lords this week, education minister Baroness (Jacqui) Smith said the government would “continue the work of the national workload action group” (NWAG), and that it would report by January 2025 on how to reduce burdens on practitioners.

Workload action group

The NWAG is a group of sector leaders, established by the last government, to “consider drivers of unnecessary workload and to develop solutions so that social workers have enough time to spend working directly with children and families”.

The initiative came out of the Conservatives’ Stable Homes, Built on Love children’s social care reform agenda and was based on a recommendation from the 2021-22 Independent Review of Children’s Social Care (the “care review”).

It appointed a consortium led by Research in Practice, including Essex County Council and King’s College London, to support the NWAG up to March 2025,while also developing resources to help councils improve retention and make better use of agency staff.

Plans to tackle managerialism and caseloads

In spring this year, the consortium selected 22 councils to help develop and test resources designed to cut workloads, based on a shortlist of priority actions selected by the DfE from a wider menu produced by Research in Practice.

Brief published minutes from a NWAG meeting on 20 May 2024 said the priority actions related to managerialism and administration, supervision, workload and caseload management, case recording and hybrid working.

Baroness Jacqui Smith (photo from Department for Education)

Smith gave her pledge to continue the NWAG’s work in response to a question from Baroness (Diana) Barran – a Conservative DfE minister from 2022-24 – about the negative impact of social worker turnover on children in care.

In response, Smith linked tackling working conditions to enhancing workforce stability, pointing to both the NWAG and the separate work by the consortium to develop resources to boost social work retention, which she said would be published this autumn.

Use of agency staff ‘worrying’

The minister also described councils’ use of agency staff as “worrying”, in the context of 17.8% of full-time equivalent council children’s social workers in England being locums as of September 2023.

“There are many good and high-quality social workers who come through the agency route, but their position is more likely to be unstable than it would be with a permanent worker,” she said.

“That is why the department is already building a new relationship with the children’s social care workforce and is looking at how to improve support for workers in children’s social care.”

Agency social work rules

While referencing the NWAG and associated work, she did not refer to the agency social work rules drawn up by its Conservative predecessor, another element of Stable Homes based on a recommendation from the care review.

However, on 12 September 2024, the government confirmed that it would implement the rules.

These will require councils to set regional caps on how much they pay agencies to employ locums, not hire agency practitioners who do not have three years’ permanent experience and maintain direct management of all social workers engaged via agency project teams.

The rules will come into force in three stages. Most will be implemented from 31 October 2024, with councils then required to submit data on their use of agency staff from the start of 2025 and then the price caps coming into force in spring next year.

Speaking in July this year, just after Labour came to power, the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) president, Andy Smith, said he expected the statutory guidance governing the rules to come into force in September.

Falling use of locums in anticipation of rules

He told Community Care at the time that the anticipation of the rules was leading councils to work together to reduce use of agency staff.

Meanwhile, four regions – the East of England, East Midlands, London and the South East – have announced a plan to develop a common agreement for their use of locums that is designed to tie in with the national rules.

Baroness Smith did set out other elements of the Stable Homes agenda that Labour would persist.

Fostering policies to continue

She said it would continue the policy of regional fostering recruitment hubs, which provide a single point of contact for people interested in fostering and support them through the process from initial enquiry to application.

Smith said the hubs covered 64% of the country, while councils not involved would be able to continue using Fosterlink, a DfE-funded support service to help them improve foster care recruitment practices.

The Conservatives provided £36m from 2023-25 to fund these and other initiatives in order to recruit 9,000 more foster carers and redress a 6% drop in the number of mainstream fostering households from 2021-23.

Labour to ‘build on’ family help work

Baroness Smith also said that the government would “build on” the work of the 10 families first for children pathfinders to respond earlier to the issues families face. The pathfinders are testing a new model of children’s services proposed by Stable Homes and recommended by the care review, which comprises:

• Multidisciplinary family help services, merging pre-existing targeted early help and child in need provision, to provide earlier support to families to help them overcome challenges and stay together.
• Expert-led multi-agency child protection teams, including specialist social workers, known as lead child protection practitioners, to improve the response of children at risk of significant harm.
• Greater use of family networks when families need support, involving the wider family in decision-making at an earlier stage and providing support packages to help them keep children safe and well at home.
• Strengthened multi-agency safeguarding arrangements, including an increased role for education.

Prior to Smith’s comments, Labour has been relatively quiet on how far it will follow the Stable Homes, Built on Love agenda.

Children’s Wellbeing Bill 

Instead, it has promoted the forthcoming Children’s Wellbeing Bill – announced in the King’s Speech – as its key vehicle for transforming children’s social care.

Janet Daby (credit: Richard Townsend Photography)

As set out in the King’s Speech, this is designed to strengthen multi-agency child protection arrangements while, earlier this month, children’s minister Janet Daby said it would also seek to tackle “profiteering” among providers of placements for children in care.

Smith repeated this point in the House of Lords this week.

“Local authorities are currently providing 45% of looked-after children’s placements and the private sector is providing 40%, some of which offer stability, high-quality and loving care for our children,” she said.

“However, where it is clear that placement providers are profiteering from the most vulnerable children in the country, this Government are absolutely committed to taking action.”

Incoming Association of Directors of Children’s Services president Andy Smith is passionate about social work’s potential to improve children’s lives.

While such a belief is commonplace among senior managers in local authority children’s services, for Smith, it is personal. He was one of those children whose lives were transformed by a social worker.

Smith was taken into care as a baby, spending the first 11 years of his life in a foster home before those same carers adopted him.

From the age of seven, up until his adoption, he had the same social worker, with whom he remained in contact into his 20s.

‘My social worker was pivotal in shaping my career’

It was a relationship that was pivotal in his decision to join the profession some 30 years ago.

“I had a really positive experience of social workers,” he says. “My social worker was really pivotal in shaping my career and my aspirations and dreams.”

This was not just based on his experiences as a child but also on what he learned reading his case files while training to be a social worker.

“It showed there was lots of good practice going on,” he says. “Even though it’s a long time ago, there are lots of similarities with what we talk about in terms of good relationship-based social work.”

A passion for social work

His positive experience is one he shares with the social workers he oversees in Derby council as its strategic director of people, a role that encompasses the statutory positions of director of children’s services (DCS) and director of adult social services (DASS).

“It’s given me a real passion for social work and the good that it can effect in people lives,” he says. “It feels very instinctive for me to talk about the power of social work, even 40 years later. It’s definitely shaped who I am.”

It is also a reason why, despite having been a senior manager for almost two decades, he maintains his social work registration.

“I’m very proud to be a registered social worker,” he says. “Even though I don’t practise on the ground, I keep connected to practise.”

Being a director ‘is a tough gig’

As one of a declining breed of “twin-hatted” directors, Smith has a lot on his plate, managing budgetary, service, workforce and political pressures across children’s and adults’ services.

He is helped, he says, by working for a “supportive organisation” in which “adults’ and children’s services are a corporate priority”.

But with 42 of the then 152 local authorities having had a change of DCS in 2022-23 and a report last year highlighting the many pressures on those holding the position, he admits that being a director is a “tough gig”.

“The context of operating as a DCS is something that feels as pressured now, if not more so than before,” he says. “One of my priorities [as president] is ensuring we support DCSs.”

Promoting greater diversity

As he made clear in his inaugural speech as president, this includes promoting greater racial diversity at director level.

Just 6% of DCSs were black or from a non-white ethnic minority as of 31 March 2023, compared with 18% of the population of England and Wales in the 2021 census and 25% of statutory children’s social workers in England, as of September 2023. 

In his speech, he said promoting a more diverse workforce was an ADCS priority and that it was committed to “highlighting, challenging and addressing issues of disproportionality, discrimination and systemic barriers that limit opportunity where they exist”.

Like his two immediate predecessors, Steve Crocker and John Pearce, Smith comes to the presidency at a time of great flux for children’s social care in England.

Crocker’s tenure coincided with the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care’s final report and the Department for Education’s response, through its Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy to reform the sector. Pearce’s term saw the ADCS seeking to influence the DfE’s approach to implementing the reforms.

A coming general election

This will continue under Smith, who will also be the president that takes association into and through the next general election, which will most likely take place in the autumn.

With Labour predicted to win, it is not clear how children’s social care policy would change as a result. Chief social worker for children and families Isabelle Trowler said recently that she did not feel the election would make a difference to the trajectory of the Stable Homes reforms (see box).

‘Lack of urgency’ to reform social care

The ADCS broadly supports the reforms and their aims: investing in early support for families and in kinship carers so fewer children need child protection interventions or to go into care; boosting the supply of care placements to tackle the current insufficiency; and improving the quality and sufficiency the social work workforce to improve relationship-based practice with families.

Its key arguments with the DfE are that the reforms lack sufficient urgency at a time when councils are struggling to keep the current system running.

“[Stable Homes] makes the case robustly that if we fail to invest in early help, we will see escalation of cost,” Smith says.

However, currently, the key reform to enable this – family help – is being tested in three areas, with seven to follow later this year. Smith says it is imperative for the approach to be tested as quickly as possible “so that we can demonstrate to the Treasury that there’s an absolute case for investment because that will lead to better outcomes and better value for money for the public purse”.

A rising care population with increased complexity of need

Trowler has said that the key success measure for the reforms will be a “massive cut” in the size of the care population. However, not only has that population grown in each of the last 15 years as councils lose foster carers and the secure home sector shrinks, but they are also working with more young people experiencing complex needs who highly tailored placements.

Placement insufficiency is driving significant cost.

Despite councils having budgeted 11% more in real terms for children’s social care in 2023-24 than 2022-23, County Councils Network research last autumn found that the 41 shire authorities alone were facing a combined £319m overspend during that financial year. 

Meanwhile, council spending on independent children’s homes more than doubled from 2015-16 to 2021-22, according to research by market analysts Revolution Consulting.

Stable Homes, Built on Love includes a number of measures designed to tackle the issue, including recruiting more foster carers – which the government is backing with £27m from 2023-25 – while the government has recently announced further funding to build children’s homes.

‘More action needed on care placements’

However, the ADCS is sceptical about the DfE’s key placements reform – creating regional care co-operatives to take over responsibility for commissioning – and, in any case, this is also years from implementation, with the department yet to announce the two pathfinder areas that will test the change.

On this too, Smith insists more urgent action is required.

“We need a properly resourced plan to tackle what is a placement sufficiency crisis and some of it cannot wait for some of the medium- and long-term plans in Stable Homes.”

In an echo of his presidential predecessors, he is also that this requires action on “profiteering” by large private equity-backed providers. He says that the £310m in profit made from publicly-funded children’s social care by 19 of the 20 biggest placement providers in 2021-22 (source: Revolution Consulting) “doesn’t feel right”.

Tackling ‘profiteering’

“I’m talking about a relatively small amount of providers who are generating a huge amount of profit,” he says. “If the government were minded there are things they could do to manage and sort that.”

In his presidential speech, he expressed support for care review lead Josh MacAlister’s call for a windfall tax on the profits of the largest providers. Pearce has previously called for national rules for the provider market, including ensuring that they charge a fair cost for care.

The government is not deaf to these calls, having promised to bring forward measures to combat profiteering in the children’s homes market later this year.

The DfE has already acted on ADCS calls to tackle what the association also described as “profiteering” in the social work agency market, through the national rules due to come into force in the summer of this year.

Qualified support for new agency social work rules

Smith strongly supports this with one caveat: the ADCS opposes the DfE’s decision to go back on its original proposal to ban outright the use of agency project teams. The practice of some agencies restricting the supply of locums to such teams, driving up costs, is directors’ chief bugbear with this market.

Under the DfE’s revised plans, project teams will be permitted but their practice must be fully under councils’ management, with the engagement of each individual worker subject to all the other national rules, including regional price caps on what authorities pay agencies.

However, in his speech, Smith said that there were “no benefits of the project team model being deployed in statutory case holding work other than the opportunities it provides for agencies to generate unacceptably high profits”.

He tells Community Care: “I think that’s something we will need to monitor the impact of going forward. It didn’t go as far as we would have liked but we’re in a better place than we were.”

Seven more councils have been chosen to test the government’s family support and child protection reforms.

They will join the existing three families first for children pathfinders in testing the changes, which are designed to ensure families receive better and earlier support to help resolve their needs and strengthen the quality of child protection practice.

What the reforms comprise

The reforms, set out in the 2023 Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy, comprise: 

1. Setting up multi-disciplinary family help teams, through the merger of existing targeted early help and child in need services, to provide more effective and non-stigmatising support to families. As part of this, non-social workers will hold child in need cases.
2. Appointing experienced and skilled social workers as lead child protection practitioners (LCPPs). They will hold all child protection cases, working in tandem with family help practitioners already involved with the family and supported by practitioners from other agencies – notably health and police – who are also particularly skilled in safeguarding.
3. Making greater use of family networks when families need help, through increased use of family group decision making and the provision of support packages to remove financial and practical barriers to networks providing this support.
4. Strengthening multi-agency safeguarding leadership, including through ensuring members of strategic partnerships are sufficiently senior to make decisions on behalf of their agency, and increasing the role of education.

Dorset, Lincolnshire and Wolverhampton councils started testing the changes in September 2023 and will be joined, later in 2024, by Lewisham, Luton, Redbridge, Walsall, Warrington, Warwickshire and Wirral.

This means there are no pathfinder authorities from the North East, South East or from Yorkshire and the Humber.

Controversial workforce changes

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.

The three original pathfinders also shared early challenges on implementing the lead practitioner role in a conference session last autumn, including retaining staff, maintaining safeguarding skills among other social workers and avoiding disruption to families

The DfE has allocated about £37m to the pathfinder programme from July 2023 to March 2025.

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By Max Stanford, head of impact and evaluation at Coram

This month marks one year since the publication of the Department for Education’s (DfE) Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy to reform children’s social care.

A core objective is improving early help services for families facing multiple disadvantages and challenges to enable their children to thrive at home.

This will place a premium on early help staff developing effective relationships with children, families and their wider network and having the skills to work with families in complex situations.

Early help staff carrying more complex cases

However, a November 2023 report by Ofsted, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) found that early help professionals were “increasingly working with highly complex family situations” that were sometimes “above a level that they felt was appropriate for them”.

It said there needed to be a “consistent expectation about practitioners’ skills, training and experience”.

Systemic practice in social work

Systemic practice with families involves a practitioner working collaboratively with a family to understand their relationships and history in order to help them resolve issues by working on these relationships and those within their wider network.

The approach has been used in children’s social care for some time and formed a large part of the Reclaiming Social Work (RSW) model first developed in Hackney. This included in-depth training in systemic practice, group systemic case discussions, and clinician support to embed systemic practice.

An evaluation of the scaling and deepening of the model found it supported high quality, family focused and strengths-based practice that built families and young people’s capacity to address their own issues more effectively.

However, systemic practice is not routinely embedded in early help services, even as families present with increasingly complex difficulties.

Exploring systemic practice’s potential in early help

In an effort to understand the potential for systemic practice to support early help services, a number of feasibility studies were published last year by What Works for Early Intervention and Children’s Social Care.

They looked at areas that had embedded systemic practice in edge of care, early help or intensive family support teams. The studies showed signs of positive impact on key workers and the families they worked with.

Building on this work, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) has commissioned a pilot study to understand the effectiveness of systemic practice within the Supporting Families programme. This involves authorities allocating key workers to provide early and co-ordinated support for families with multiple needs to help improve their outcomes and reduce costs to the state.

About the study

Coram, the first children’s charity, has been commissioned to lead the pilot study. Coram will work with the Institute for Family Therapy (IFT), the UK’s leading provider of family therapy and systemic psychotherapy training, to support the delivery of the pilot, and with Ecorys to carry out its evaluation via a randomised controlled trial.

The pilot study will involve local authorities embedding systemic practice in their Supporting Families key worker teams in a similar way to some aspects of the RSW model. This will include:

• Systemic training by accredited IFT systemic tutors for all keyworkers, plus an additional 10 days of training for a number of keyworkers to becoming ‘systemic champions’, who will support the embedding of systemic practice.
• Funding local authorities for the duration of the trial to hire a systemic practitioner qualified to an intermediate level in systemic practice. They will provide ongoing targeted training, monthly group reflective practice sessions and one-to-one consultation for key workers, and support the use of systemic tools such as genograms and outcome measures.
• Support from IFT including a systemic practice virtual hub providing an administrative resource and networking centre for all keyworkers, embedded systemic practitioners and systemic champions. This will be overseen by an IFT systemic psychotherapist delivery lead, who will support local authorities.

The aim of the pilot is to test whether embedding systemic practice will help to improve key worker practice, to ensure that children and families in need have the right support at the right time.

Randomised controlled trial

The pilot will be evaluated through a randomised controlled trial involving 12 local authorities selected at randomly: six will deliver the systemic practice model, while the other six will act as a control group. The latter local authorities will be provided with financial and technical support to collect data throughout the pilot and with training in systemic practice after the pilot has ended in late 2025.

While pilots of this nature have become increasingly common in children’s social care, they are much less common in early help services.

This first of its kind study will not only be used to inform the development of the Supporting Families programme delivery, but will be central to the DfE’s reform of children’s social care.

It will also be an important element of the transfer of  Supporting Families from the DLUHC to the DfE in April 2024.

Shaping family help services

The pilot study will provide evidence to inform the development of family help services, bringing together early help and child in need provision into a single system. These are being tested in the Families First for Children pathfinder programme.

The aim is that embedding systemic practice will help upskill practitioners and develop multidisciplinary teams to better support families with multiple or complex needs and subsequently rebalance children’s social care away from costly crisis intervention.

The Supporting Families programme is inviting local authorities to submit expressions of interest to participate in the pilot study via Coram by 11 March 2024 with the pilot beginning in September 2024, running until December 2025. You can find out more about the pilot and submit an expression of interest for your local authority on Coram’s website.

Introducing specialist child protection social workers is posing workforce challenges for the councils testing the system.

Issues included retaining staff, maintaining safeguarding skills among other social workers and avoiding disruption to families as a result of the reform.

Leaders from Dorset, Lincolnshire and Wolverhampton councils relayed the messages in a session at this week’s National Children and Adult Services Conference (NCASC) on their experience as families first for children pathfinders.

Testing children’s social care reforms

The three – who will be joined on the programme by other councils next year – are testing four of the key planks of the government’s children’s social care reform plan, Stable Homes, Built on Love:

1. Setting up multi-disciplinary family help teams, through the merger of existing targeted early help and child in need services, to provide more effective and non-stigmatising support to families.
2. Appointing experienced and skilled social workers as lead child protection practitioners (LCPPs). They will hold all child protection cases, working in tandem with family help practitioners already involved with the family and supported by practitioners from other agencies – notably health and police – who are also particularly skilled in safeguarding.
3. Making greater use of family networks when families need help, through increased use of family group decision making and the provision of support packages to remove financial and practical barriers to networks providing this support.
4. Strengthening multi-agency safeguarding leadership, including through ensuring members of strategic partnerships are sufficiently senior to make decisions on behalf of their agency, and increasing the role of education.

Mixed response to lead practitioner role

The proposed lead child protection practitioner role, which the DfE adopted from the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, drew a mixed response from respondents to the consultation on the reforms.

Council leaders warned it could be difficult to recruit to the role and stressed the importance of all social workers having child protection expertise.

The latter point was raised by Wolverhampton director of children’s services (DCS) Alison Hinds at this week’s NCASC session.

Maintaining safeguarding skills

“How we ensure social workers remain skilled in that safeguarding area when they are not lead child protection practitioners is crucial for future management of risk,” she said.

Lincolnshire DCS Heather Sandy said level 1 social workers, who are in the early part of their career, were still holding child protection cases.

“We see it as a key part of their development,” she said.

Leaders also suggested there were challenges in retaining social workers who were just doing child protection work, rather than having a diverse caseload including children in need, as was the case outside the pathfinder areas.

Need to avoid burnout

Dorset’s corporate director for care and protection, Paul Dempsey, said it had capped LCPPs’ caseloads at 12 and given them more complex child in need cases, to provide a mix of work.

“We want to make it an attractive role and avoid burnout,” he added.

Dorset is also testing allowing lead practitioners to chair their own child protection conferences, rather than having an independent chair, as is currently required by Working Together to Safeguard Children.

This idea was proposed by the care review as a way of freeing up social work resource. However, the British Association of Social Workers said at the time that the proposal was a “massive concern” because it would be difficult for a case-holding practitioner to “objectively” chair a conference.

Warning over independence of conference chairs

These concerns were raised during this week’s session.

In a question to the panel, Haringey council director of children’s services Ann Graham said: “I do remember the tensions of working with the family to make change and then I put myself in the role of the chair – that could create a further tension in that relationship.

“The other thing in that relationship is, if the child protection lead is the conference chair, how do we avoid group think and tunnel vision because we know they can be problematic?”

Sandy said Lincolnshire would not be testing the idea as the authority did not see it as “a step in the positive direction”.

Dempsey said Dorset was testing it out in one of its localities, adding that the authority was “not sure that’s the greatest idea in the pathfinder programme”.

“While we’re testing it out, we will have one of our quality assurance professionals in that meeting to offer a bit of scrutiny and independence and also to make sure that parent voice is heard in that meeting,” he added.

Concerns over case handovers

Pathfinders were also wrestling with the impact on families of having a new social worker – the LCPP – enter their lives at the point of child protection when they had already been working with a family help lead practitioner.

Hinds said Wolverhampton had thought a lot about this issue.

“We are just thinking about how complicated it could be for families when there are in high levels of anxiety and stress, they could have a social worker who is their lead family help practitioner and we then introduce another social worker who is their child protection lead,” she added.

“We are really thinking about families’ experiences about what that will look like.”

Dempsey pointed to the fact that the family help lead practitioner was expected to stay with the family, adding: “We are trying to make all our handovers as warm as possible. The model expects the family help practitioner to stay with the family when the family moves into the child protection space, to try and avoid that handover.”

Non-social workers taking on child in need cases

Another controversial element of the reform is the DfE’s plan for non-social workers to hold child in need cases – though with social worker oversight – as lead practitioners within the new family help teams.

Both the British Association of Social Workers and Ofsted have raised concerns that this will increase risks to children because of the complexity of the needs of families involved in child in need cases.

Dempsey said Dorset was looking at the training needs of family help lead practitioners who were not social workers and said a key focus was how to oversee arrangements when the practitioner was employed outside the council.

The pathfinders are currently due to run until March 2025, with no certainty that the reforms will be implemented thereafter, which Sandy said was a concern.

“The biggest challenge is sustainability – disrupting teams, making change to families and not having guarantees of funding beyond the next 18 months is really challenging,” she added.

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”.