The youngest children are at increased risk of harm due to growth in the numbers of parents with mental health and substance misuse issues, research has found.

Directors linked the trends in parental needs to poverty, inadequate housing and the legacy of pandemic, and said they were leaving infants at risk of neglect and physical injury.

The findings were reported in the latest phase of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services’ (ADCS) Safeguarding Pressures research series, through which it has analysed demand for, and provision of, children’s social care since 2010.

Phase 9 of the series covered 2022-24 and was based on data from 124 local authorities, extrapolated to cover all 153 councils, survey responses from 86 authorities and interviews with 34 directors of children’s services.

Growth in parental mental ill-health and substance misuse

Department for Education (DfE) data has revealed growth in the numbers of children in need assessments which identified parental mental health or substance misuse problems between 2022 and 2024. According to the DfE’s children in need census:

• Parental mental health concerns were identified 165,480 times in 2023-24, up from 158,330 in 2021-22, a rise of 4.5%. This made it the most common factor identified following an assessment, replacing domestic abuse where a parent is the victim, for which there were 160,600 cases in 2023-24, a similar number to 2021-22.
• Parental alcohol misuse concerns were identified 72,410 times in 2023-24, up 3% on 2021-22 (70,310).
• Parental drug misuse concerns were identified 70,940 times in 2023-24, up 5.8% on 2021-22 (67,010).

Three-quarters of respondents to the ADCS survey said issues arising from a deterioration in parental mental health had increased pressures on their services over the past two years, while two-thirds said the same about parental substance misuse.

Increased numbers of infants at risk

Directors said this was leading to increasing numbers of infants being at risk of, or experiencing, serious harm, particularly neglect or physical injury, and they linked the rising levels of parental need to family levels, poverty and inadequate housing.

Most directors reported increasing demand for children’s services from poor quality housing, homelessness and families experiencing poverty as a result of welfare reforms.

They also linked increasing parental mental health issues to the legacy of the pandemic, new parents lacking experiences of “good enough parenting” from their own childhoods and cuts to other services, such as health visiting provision.

In response to the findings, sector what works body Foundations said they underlined “the need to provide effective mental health support for parents”, including through parenting support. Its deputy chief executive, Donna Molloy, said it would shortly produce guidance for councils on “proven interventions” in relation to parenting support for families in contact with children’s social care.

Rising numbers of initial contacts but referral numbers fall

Councils reported a rise in initial contacts regarding safeguarding concerns, continuing a trend dating back to 2007-8, with the number received in 2023-24 (3,001,339) 8% up on the 2021-22 total. Two-thirds of the 2023-24 contacts came from the police, health or education.

However, the DfE’s census has shown a decrease in the number of referrals to children’s social care, which fell from 650,270 in 2021-22 to 621,880 in 2023-24, as well as in the number of children in need plans and child protection plans from 2022-24.

The ADCS found that councils accepted 22% of contacts in 2023-24 as a children’s social care referral (compared with 24% in 2021-22). Fourteen per cent were passed to early help (down from 16% in 2021-22), 30% signposted to other services or resulting in the provision of information and advice (33% in 2021-22) and 23% resulted in no further action, up from 16% in 2021-22.

“This suggests that much of this demand is being managed through an increased early help offer and by local authorities acting as a central point for offering information, advice and signposting to other services on behalf of the local partnership,” the ADCS said.

Increased use of early help

Despite the drop in the proportion of contacts referred to early help from 2022-24, the ADCS said the number of such referrals had grown by 93% from 2015-16 to 2023-24, from about 224,000 to 431,000.

Two-thirds of survey respondents said they had increased their provision of early help and targeted family support services from 2022-24. This included the establishment of family hubs, which provide a range of support services to families in a single place and for which half of local authority areas have received funding since 2022.

The ADCS said family hubs were “viewed very positively” by directors, with three-quarters of survey respondents saying they had set up such services, including some who had not received government funding.

The association added that councils had also relied heavily on funding from the Supporting Families programme, under which families with multiple needs are provided with multi-agency support, co-ordinated by a lead practitioner, and for which councils have been provided with £695m from 2022-25.

Last November, in a move strongly welcomed by ADCS, the government scrapped the payment by results element of the scheme, under which most councils received some money up front with the rest delivered based on the outcomes achieved for families.

Rollout of family help

Looking ahead, the government has allocated £250m in 2025-26 to roll out the family help model, under which councils provide multidisciplinary support to families in need by merging existing targeted early help and child in need services and bringing in staff with expertise in areas such as domestic abuse.

The model is being tested in the 10 families first for children pathfinder areas, though ADCS found that some other councils were adopting a similar approach.

In relation to looked-after children, the ADCS report charted the significant rise in the number of unaccompanied children, which grew by 30% from 2022-24, from 5,680 to 7,380, according to DfE figures.

The ADCS also highlighted the changing composition of the group, with the proportion of boys rising from 90% to 96%, and the proportion of those aged 16 or 17 increasing from 86% to 89%, from 2020-24.

Concerns over care of unaccompanied children and care leavers

Despite the government’s National Transfer Scheme – which aims to ensure unaccompanied children are more evenly spread throughout the country – the ADCS found numbers were far higher in the South East, where the vast majority of young people arrive, than in other regions.

Directors said that the “absence of national planning and support to enable an effective and sustainable asylum system was a source of real concern”. They also reported struggling to provide young people with the trauma-informed care and support they needed.

The ADCS also highlighted the number of care leavers who were former unaccompanied children, which grew by 25%, from 11,640 to 14,560, from 2022-24, and warned that councils were being under-funded to support them.

‘Shortfall in care leaver funding leaving young people at risk’

It cited a report last year by East Midlands Councils, which said that Home Office funding covered just 59% of the costs of supporting former unaccompanied care leavers, with the region’s annual shortfall in cash rising from £5.2m to £7.5m from 2020-24.

“Respondents to both the survey and interviews described how a lack of access to education, employment and appropriate therapeutic support leaves young people in limbo, exacerbating
mental health difficulties, risk of exploitation and involvement in unlawful activity, such as modern slavery,” the ADCS said.

A growing workforce but concerns over experience and agency use

The Safeguarding Pressures report also referenced the fact that the number of social workers in post in local authority children’s services reached a record high – 33,119 full-time equivalents – in September 2023, up by 4.7% on the year before.

The ADCS said that the increased numbers were largely newly qualified staff, “which can create pressures on more experienced colleagues”.

The report also noted that the number of agency staff in post also reached a record high (7,174 full-time equivalents) in September 2023, representing 17.8% of the workforce.

The association said that, while the 10 authorities with the lowest rates of agency use were all rated outstanding or good by Ofsted, seven of the 10 with the highest rates were rated inadequate with another two graded as requires improvement.

“[Directors] report that a negative judgement following inspection by Ofsted generates increased staff churn and reliance on agency social workers,” the report said.

Agency social work rules

In October 2024, the government began implementing rules on councils’ use of agency social work, which will be fully in force by October 2025. These include:

• A bar on staff with less than three years’ experience in a permanent role in local authority children’s services from taking up an agency post.
• A three-month ban on councils engaging social workers as locums within three months of them leaving a permanent role in the same region.
• Regionally agreed caps on maximum hourly pay rates for agency staff.
• Ensuring councils have direct management of staff supplied through agency project teams.

The ADCS is very supportive of the rules, but have called on the government to go further, by banning project teams outright for case-holding social work.

While the government has not committed to this, it has pledged to strengthen the agency rules by putting them into legislation and to extend them to non-social work roles in children’s services.

Four in ten family support and early help workers have personal experience of domestic abuse, a survey has found.

The proportion of those who reported personal experience of domestic abuse (39.1%) compares with a prevalence rate for women aged over 16 across England and Wales of 27% as of 2023, according to Office for National Statistics (ONS) data.

Women accounted for 90.9% of the 350 practitioners, across 11 local authorities, surveyed online as part of a scoping study into early help and family support staff’s domestic abuse knowledge and skills.

The study, commissioned by children’s services evidence body Foundations, found that personal experience had helped some staff understand the impact of domestic abuse on those they supported.

However, it also underlined the importance of providing wellbeing services, including counselling and reflective supervision, for practitioners, said the report, produced by social work academics from the University of Central Lancashire and King’s College London.

DfE plans to expand role of early help staff

Foundations commissioned the research in the light of the Department for Education’s children’s social care reforms, which envisage an expanded role for early help staff in supporting families in significant need, including domestic abuse.

Under the plans, currently being tested, existing targeted early help and child in need provision will be merged into a new family help service, designed to provide early, non-stigmatising support that prevents families’ needs from escalating.

At the same time, early help and family support practitioners – and other non-social workers – will be able to take responsibility for child in need cases, with social work supervision, under revisions to the Working Together to Safeguard Children guidance.

Concerns over knowledge and skills

However, inspectorates including Ofsted have raised concerns about some early help staff already receiving overly complex cases.

At the same time, the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel has detected a “simplistic and over-optimistic” approach to domestic abuse within children’s services, generally.

As well as the online survey, the Foundations-commissioned study was based on:

• Staff feedback on an online training module they were invited to complete alongside the survey.
• Case studies in five of the authorities, involving interviews with practitioners and managers and analysis of strategic documents.
• Interviews with four domestic abuse training providers.
• A review of policy documents in England and Wales.

Positive impact of domestic abuse training 

Most survey respondents (84.3%) had worked on at least one domestic abuse case in the past six months and a similar proportion (85.1%) of staff had received domestic abuse training.

Overall, two-thirds (67.9%) of respondents said they had had sufficient training to assist victims, with the rest not confident or unsure.

And while most staff expressed confidence in relation to key practice tasks and skills in domestic abuse, levels of confidence were related to whether they had received training.

For example, while 65% of those who had not received training felt confident they could make appropriate and sensitive referrals for those who had experienced domestic abuse, this was true of 88% who had received training.

Recognising indicators of abuse

This gap was also evident in relation to recognising possible indicators of domestic abuse, self-reported knowledge and attitudes.

Staff who had received training were significantly more likely than those who had not to always/nearly always enquire about domestic abuse in response to mental health, physical health, parental conflict or school attendance problems.

Having had training was also associated with better self-reported knowledge on all of a list of 18 areas.

Domestic abuse knowledge and attitudes

Overall, respondents were most likely to say they knew quite a bit or a lot about the impact on children and young people (83.1%), signs and symptoms (80.3%) and their role in relation to domestic abuse (78%).

Knowledge was lowest in relation to national guidance, for example on the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, where 28% reported knowing quite a bit or a lot, followed by responding to perpetrators (37.6%).

In relation to attitudes, while 31.3% of staff believed that ‘women abuse men as much as men abuse women’, this belief was significantly more common among untrained staff.

Feedback from staff who completed the training module after the survey identified improvements in self-reported knowledge compared with their levels beforehand.

Impact of experience on domestic abuse skills

Alongside training, those who had worked for their employer for longer were more likely to express confidence in their skills and self-reported knowledge of domestic abuse. Over half (57.4%) had worked for their current employer for more than five years.

Case study local authorities provided early help and family support staff with a range of external and in-house training – the latter being more generic – but acknowledged that provision was constrained by budgets.

Practitioners identified knowledge and training gaps in relation to working with disabled children, families from diverse communities and LGBTQ+ families.

And though much early help and family support work in the case study areas involved domestic abuse, practitioners had limited experience of working with perpetrators, who tended to be referred to specialist staff.

Case study authorities provided staff with support to deal with the challenging aspects of domestic abuse work, including reflective and clinical supervision, debriefing, group sessions and access to counselling.

Improved domestic abuse training urged

The report set out a number of implications for policy and practice from the research, including that:

• Training on domestic abuse, from induction to advanced level, should be embedded in councils’ early help and family support workforce development strategies.
• Authorities leverage the skills and knowledge of domestic abuse specialists in supporting their early help and family support staff.
• Councils build early help and family support staff’s confidence and skills in working with perpetrators and supporting children affected by domestic abuse, including disabled children.
• Training represents the experiences of diverse communities in relation to domestic abuse.
• Authorities support the wellbeing of their workforces through clinical and reflective supervision and access to counselling.

Support is available 24/7 from Refuge’s freephone national domestic abuse helpline (0808 2000 247).

National thresholds and stronger guidance are needed to address a postcode lottery in support for children in need, the Children’s Commissioner for England has warned.

Despite the focus of current government reforms on intervening early to help children stay with their families, the changes are insufficiently focused on those on child in need (CIN) plans, said the rights watchdog.

Rachel de Souza delivered the messages in a report issued today analysing Department for Education data – some of it previously unpublished – on children on CIN plans.

Postcode lottery 

This identified huge variations between councils in the likelihood of children having no further action taken following a social care referral, proportions of children in need on CIN plans, the number of plans per head of population and their duration.

Also, most councils did not set minimum requirements for children on CIN plans to be visited by social workers or other lead practitioners, the research found.

The commissioner said the findings reflected a lack of guidance and robust data in relation to children on CIN plans, compared with those on child protection (CP) plans or who were looked after.

“It is vital that we get things right for children on child in need plans,” said de Souza. “Good support will not only help to make their lives happier and healthier but can also prevent things escalating to the point where a child might need to be taken into care.”

About the research

The commissioner’s report drew on:

• Data from 145 of the then 152 councils from the DfE’s 2022-23 child in need census, including on the number and rates of child in need plans.
• Unpublished 2021-22 DfE data from 144 authorities on the characteristics of children in need, linked to statistics on the same children’s education, including attendance and special education needs provision.
• Analysis of CIN policies and procedures from 125 councils.

The research found that, in 2021-22, the proportion of children’s social care referrals that resulted in no further action (NFA) ranged from 1.6% to 63% between authorities, with an average of 32%.

Such divergence was “surprising”, said the report, and it was not clear how far this was down to different thresholds for action, differences in referral practice by partner agencies or variations in early help provision to refer families onto in NFA cases.

Wide variations in CIN plan rates

While 0.9% of children were on a CIN plan nationally as of March 2023, this ranged from 0.3% to 3.16% in different areas.

And though 27.5% of children in need were on a CIN plan as of March 2022 nationally, the rate varied from 3.6% to 70% between individual councils. Children not on CIN plans include those on CP plans, looked-after children, care leavers, adopted children and those in the assessment process.

“This suggests that, unless the levels of underlying need are indeed this variable, local areas have substantially different thresholds for section 17 support,” said the report.

Another area of large variation was the average duration of plans, which ranged from 35 to 388 days in 2021-22.

Guidance on social work visits lacking

Analysis of council procedures found that 74% did not specify how often social workers or lead professionals should visit children on CIN plans, with most of these authorities stating that this should be as often as the plan says.

For those that specified a frequency, the biggest group stipulated visits at least every four weeks (13%), with the others ranging from twice a month to once every three months.

There was more consistency in procedures in relation to frequencies of plan reviews, with 66% requiring this at least every three months and a further 18% specifying reviews every two months.

Variations linked to lack of CIN guidance

The commissioner’s report linked the huge variations in support for children in need to a lack of national guidance on CIN provision.

While Working Together for Safeguarding Children sets out detailed guidance on carrying out child protection enquiries, holding conferences, drawing up CP plans and reviewing them, including with timescales, there is much less prescription in relation to the CIN process.

The only guidance in relation to CIN plans states that they should set “clear measurable outcomes for the child and expectations for the parents”, reflecting the family’s strengths and weaknesses, and acknowledging extra-familial factors undermining parenting capacity or the child’s safety.

Councils have ‘latitude’ in determining thresholds

The statutory guidance “leaves a great deal of latitude for determining the threshold” of support – as set out in councils’ threshold documents, said the commissioner’s report.

“It is no wonder that the level of intervention that children receive differs greatly as there is no national guidance that sets out the thresholds of need that should prompt intervention or that define how often children should receive help or how frequently it is reviewed,” it added.

The commissioner’s report acknowledged that the DfE’s Stable Homes, Built on Love reforms were focused on providing improved support to children and families earlier on, to prevent their needs from escalating.

This would be delivered by a new family help service, merging existing targeted early help and child in need provision, a model that is currently being tested in three local areas.

However, the strategy contains no specific measures on CIN plans, and the commissioner’s office said it was “concerned that these reforms are not informed by a robust understanding of how child in need plans serve as a distinct intervention for families”.

National guidance and thresholds urged

The report called for the government to set national guidance defining automatic triggers for referral to social care, thresholds that children and families must meet to receive CIN support and expectations for frequencies of visits to children and plan reviews.

The DfE should also include a measure for assessing the progress of children on CIN plans in the children’s social care dashboard it will publish later this year to track the performance of the sector, it added.

The only indicators relating to CIN in the proposed dashboard are the rates of children in need in each area and the attendance and educational attainment of those on CIN plans. However, the department has acknowledged that the proposed measures have “limitations” in measuring outcomes, given they are based on available data.

Among the commissioner’s other recommendations was the proposed introduction of a statutory duty on councils to deliver early help, to ensure that families denied CIN services are supported to prevent their needs from escalating.

DfE defends Working Together guidance

Despite the commissioner’s report highlighting Working Together’s alleged deficiencies in relation to CIN plans, the DfE’s response focused squarely on the statutory guidance.

“In December 2023, we published revised multi-agency statutory guidance, Working Together to Safeguard Children, with a focus on strengthening multi-agency working across the whole system of help, support and protection,” said the spokesperson.

“This guidance makes clear that all local authorities must set out clear arrangements for how cases will be managed once a child is referred into local authority children’s social care as part of their local protocols.”

The spokesperson also pointed to the £6.48m that the department had provided to help local areas implement the changes to Working Together.

Directors stress need for local flexibility

The Association of Directors of Children’s Services welcomed the report’s call to “put early help on a statutory footing with dedicated, ring fenced funding, and calls for better national data”.

However, ADCS president John Pearce urged caution in relation to its recommendations for “consistency and blanket guidance” because of the need for services to be “tailored to individual needs”.

He said councils’ service offer would “look markedly different from place to place” because of their local population, geography, context and finances – particularly in the “14th year of austerity”.

“This flexibility is particularly important here given the broad range of needs of the children we work with in this space, including homeless young people, families with no recourse to public funds and children with disabilities,” he added.

“It is important that social workers can use their professional judgement when assessing the level of support required and the frequency of visits.”

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Birmingham council is reviewing its adult social work teams with a view to saving £3.7m over the next two years as part of moves to balance its budget by 2026.

The measure is a small part of a £367m savings package from 2024-26 approved by the authority’s cabinet yesterday, and due to go to the full council on 5 March for final sign-off.

The authority is also planning to save £16m from adult social care packages and £19m through reductions in its contract with Birmingham Children’s Trust, which delivers children’s social care in the city.

Council’s dire financial situation

The plan is the council’s response to the dire financial situation that forced it to issue two section 114 notices in September 2023, declaring its inability to balance its budget, as required.

The situation was triggered by the council facing an equal pay liability of £760m, due to discriminatory pay practices, though subsequent investigation revealed “significant structural issues” in its finances.

In response, levelling up secretary Michael Gove sent in commissioners to oversee the running of the council, including its financial management, and they subsequently instructed the authority to balance its budget by 2026.

Gove has allowed the authority to raise council tax by 9.99% in each of the next two years – double the usual permitted amount – and agreed a £1.255bn in “exceptional financial support” to enable the council to balance its budget in 2024-25.

This will enable the council to use the sale of assets or borrowing to fund day-to-day expenditure, contrary to the normal accounting rules. It applies to spending dating from 2020-21 to 2024-25.

Social care spending to rise despite savings

Due to demand and inflationary pressures, spending on both adult social care and children’s services will increase year on year, despite the council’s savings plans.

In adult social care, the authority is planning to increase its base budget from £426.4m in 2023-24 to £475.8m in 2024-25 and £489.9m, reliant on making savings of £23.7m in 2023-24 and £52.9m in 2024-25.

The biggest savings item, worth £5.7m in 2024-25 and £10.2m in 2025-26, is a plan to “review care packages to reflect a strength-based approach whilst still meeting assessed needs”.

The council said it envisaged “maximising the offer of the third sector, reducing reliance on traditional home care by the use of equipment and technology-enabled care and reviewing the provision to young people as they transition from children’s to adults’ services”.

Review of social work teams

It has also pencilled in £1.5m in 2024-25 and £2.2m in 2025-26 from a “review of social work teams” designed to “improve efficiencies” and “reduce vacancies”.

It is not clear what this will mean for existing social workers in adults’ services. Birmingham said it would only be able to provide further details of savings proposals after the full council had agreed the budget on 5 March.

Within children’s social care, funding for Birmingham Children’s Trust is due to rise from £245.8m in 2023-24 to £278.7m in 2024-25 and £284.9m in 2025-26, including due to increased care placement and social work staffing costs.

Contract reductions for children’s trust

However, this also comprises a £9m in savings from the trust’s contract in 2024-25, followed by a £10m reduction in 2025-26.

The council is also planning to end its direct funding of early help services – saving £8.4m a year – including provision it commissions from the trust.

Birmingham Children’s Trust’s chief executive, James Thomas, said it was having to make savings of £16.3m – 8% of its revenue – due to the council’s decisions.

Trust ‘minimising impact of cuts on services’

“We have worked hard to minimise the impact of these cuts on statutory services but inevitably there will be some service reductions,” he said.

“Through a range of measures including, for example, better use of grants, greater partnership contributions, and more effective cost control and commissioning measures for high-cost placements, we have been able to reduce the impact on frontline delivery to £2.1m, which is 1%.”

In relation to the council’s withdrawal of early help funding, Thomas said the trust had agreed to “step in and maintain as much of the funding…as possible” by making savings elsewhere.

Protection for early help services

He said this meant the trust would be able to maintain all of its existing targeted family support services and some – but not all – of the funding of voluntary and community organisations currently provided by the council.

“Whilst these services are non-statutory and, in effect, discretionary, we recognise that they are vital in preventing family crisis and the escalation of need to more expensive interventions,” Thomas added.

Despite the scale of the savings, Birmingham council still needs to find a further £67m to balance its budget in 2025-26.

Council ‘needs to do better on recruitment’

In a separate report to the cabinet, its commissioners, led by former local authority chief executive Max Caller, said they believed the budget was “deliverable”, but this required “major improvements in the arrangements for the delivery of savings”.

“There is also a real need to ensure council recruits, retains and invests in people with the right skills and knowledge to undertake this work,” they added.

“The council has made limited progress in this area and needs to do far more and at a far greater pace.”

Nationwide funding challenges

Despite the specific circumstances facing Birmingham, funding challenges are a nationwide problem for councils, according to two recent surveys.

About half of councils (51%) said they were likely to issue a section 114 notice in the next five years, with 9% saying they would do so in the next financial year, in response to a survey by think-tank the Local Government Information Unit (LGiU).

LGiU received responses from 128 authorities, including district councils, who do not have responsibility for social care.

Widespread pressures on social care

Among upper-tier authorities – those with social services responsibility – children’s services and education constituted the biggest short-term pressure, cited by 73% of respondents.

Over the long term, adult social care was seen as the biggest pressure, cited by 52% of upper-tier councils.

Separately, an Local Government Association survey found that 75% of upper-tier councils would have to make savings to adult social care and 69% to children’s services.

This was despite ministers finding an extra £500m for the two services beyond what it had already allocated, in the 2024-25 local government funding settlement.

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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.

“Getting the basics right” around social work has been key to year-on-year improvements in council performance in children’s services, an Ofsted leader has said.

Yvette Stanley’s comments came as the inspectorate’s latest annual report showed 60% of the 153 English authorities were rated good or outstanding for children’s services as of September this year.

This is a rise from 56% at the same time in 2022, 51% in 2021 and 50% in 2020.

Performance under the current inspection of local authority children’s services (ILACS) framework is also significantly better than under the previous single inspection framework (SIF), which was in place up to the end of 2017. Just 36% of authorities were rated good or outstanding after their first SIF inspection.

‘Getting the basics right’ key to improvement

In its report, Ofsted said there was “no one reason” for councils’ improved performance but said it had seen authorities “investing in strengths-based models of social work with families” and “setting clear direction for their social work teams”.

Expanding on these points, Stanley, Ofsted’s national director for social care, attributed the progress to “stable leadership, a clear practice model that keeps children front and centre and creating the right environment for social workers to do their best work, the importance of manageable caseloads, and the support around social workers – the administrative systems – so they can spend more time doing direct work with children”.

“It’s about getting the basics right,” she added. “We’ve seen significant improvements in those areas.”

New care leaver judgment

This year also saw the introduction of a separate judgment in relation to councils’ services for care leavers, which has been decoupled from a previous joint category encompassing looked-after children’s provision.

Of the 26 authorities rated on the measure, 57% were rated good or outstanding, with 13 having a different grade from their performance for children in care.

Photo: Valerii Honcharuk/Adobe Stock

“These differences in quality were less visible under the previous combined judgement, Ofsted said. “We are now more easily able to highlight good and poor practice for these distinct groups and make more targeted recommendations.”

Councils’ overall progress comes despite a hugely challenging backdrop for children’s social care, which was highlighted in the report.

Rising social work vacancy and agency rates

The council children’s social worker vacancy rate rose from 16.7% to 20%, and the agency staff rate from 15.5% to 17.6%, in the year to September 2022, following years of relative stability.

Source: Department for Education children’s social work workforce census, 2022

Ofsted said there was an “overreliance on agency social workers which undermines the consistency of the support that children experience”.

The Department for Education (DfE) is planning to introduce national rules to reduce councils’ use of agency social workers in children’s services, however, it has diluted its original plans following a consultation.

Placement shortage amid rising care population

The inspectorate also flagged up the ongoing challenges councils faced in securing sufficient appropriate care placements, in the context of a 15th year of rising numbers of looked-after children.

As it reported earlier this month, the number of mainstream fostering households shrank for a second consecutive year in 2022-23.

And while the number of registered children’s home places rose by 5% in 2022-23, following a 4% increase in 2021-22, Ofsted said that the location of new homes did not match children’s needs.

“Homes continue to open disproportionately in the regions where numbers are already the highest,” said the annual report. “The North West accounts for a quarter of all children’s homes and almost a quarter of all places.”

Illegal use of unregistered homes

The shortage of placements was leading to some children being placed in unregistered children’s homes, which are illegal.

As has been well-documented, these have been used for the rapidly-rising number of children who need to be deprived of their liberty but who cannot be placed in secure children’s homes, for which 50 children are waiting for each place at any one time.

But Ofsted said unregistered placements were also used as a “stop-gap” for other children who could not be placed elsewhere.

“Although these homes are often a last resort and intended to be temporary, the national shortage of placements for children with complex needs means some particularly vulnerable children live in these settings for long periods,” it said.

It said it completed 530 investigations into possible unregistered homes during 2022-23, in most cases after being notified by the placing local authority.

In 370 cases (70%), the home should have been registered, resulting in Ofsted sending the provider a warning letter. In most of these cases, the home then stopped operating.

Concerns about solo placements

Ofsted also found that an increasing number of homes were operating below capacity. In some cases, this was because councils were commissioning solo placements – because of the complexity of a child’s needs – and in others, it was due to homes struggling to recruit staff.

Photo: Presidentk52/Fotolia

While it said solo placements were right for some children, Ofsted added that it was “concerned at the continuing rise in children living alone and with very high staffing numbers”.

On staffing, it said 35% of care staff in children’s homes left their posts during 2022-23 – the same proportion as in 2021-22 – reducing young people’s chances of “building the relationships that are important for [their] wellbeing and sense of belonging”.

Fall in proportion of qualified staff

Providers and councils reported that staff in roles that required few or no qualifications were moving to better-paid jobs in other industries, while more qualified workers were moving into higher-paid agency roles.

Half of children’s homes staff held a required level 3 qualification (54%), down from 61% four years ago.

And while the proportion of registered children’s home managers holding the mandatory level 5 qualification has increased from 50% to 64% since 2018-19, 12% of homes did not have a manager in place as of the end of 2022-23.

“This leaves a significant gap in oversight of what is happening for children,” the report added.

Impact of ending unregulated provision

Council leaders have also raised concerns that the introduction of regulation of semi-independent settings for 16- and 17-year-olds – now renamed ‘supported accommodation – will worsen the sufficiency problem.

Councils’ use of such placements has grown significantly over the past two years. However, providers were only expected to register four out of every five semi-beds they previously operated with Ofsted, found a report published in July by the County Councils Network (CCN) and London Innovation and Improvement Alliance.

(credit: caracoot / Adobe Stock)

Ofsted said that, as of the deadline of 28 October, 2023, 680 providers, operating 5,930 settings, had been registered or had applied to do so.

It also received 43% more applications to register children’s homes in 2022-23 compared with 2021-22 (630, up from 440) and suggested some of these may have been from former semi-independent settings.

“Extending regulation to all provision means that existing providers are deciding whether to register children’s homes or as a supported accommodation provider,” Ofsted added.

Targeted early help concerns

Outside of care placements, Ofsted’s annual report also raised concerns about targeted early help services, based on thematic inspections carried out with fellow inspectorates earlier this year and at the end of 2022.

While it found “well-trained and knowledgeable early help workers undertaking effective work”, Ofsted added that in some areas lead professionals lacked the skills and knowledge required for the risks the children they worked with faced.

Stanley told Community Care: “We are seeing very little early help in some areas. That’s sadly leaving families in the preventative space losing out.”

The annual report comes with the DfE planning a raft of reforms to children’s social care, including to improve the sufficiency of care placements and the quality and capacity of family support.

Children’s social care reforms

In regard to the latter, the department is testing bringing together targeted early help and child in need services into a single family help service. This will involve, among other things, enabling non-social work staff to carry child in need cases, which is currently prohibited by the Working Together to Safeguard Children guidance.

Ofsted has previously raised concerns about this change potentially increasing risks to children.

“We see benefits in a system that brings targeted early help and child in need work together,” Ofsted said in its annual report. “Managing risk carefully and making sure that the system does not become overwhelmed will require careful work and good oversight, especially given that the workforce is already stretched.”

Families are missing out on the social work support they need because some early help staff are being given overly complex cases, inspectors have found.

Inspections of five areas identified some “excellent” early help practice, but also cases where lead professionals did not have the necessary skills and experience to provide robust oversight of the situation, amid a lack of early help staff capacity across agencies.

Ofsted, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) found cases where families should have been stepped up from early help to statutory social care earlier than they were because of the risks to children. There were also variations between areas about where this threshold lay.

The inspectorates delivered the messages in a report published today summarising findings from the five joint targeted area inspections (JTAIs), carried out between December 2022 and March 2023.

These were focused on targeted early help, a voluntary, casework-based service for children and families with complex needs who do not meet the threshold for statutory social care

Social care reform concerns

The report comes with the Department for Education planning to merge targeted early help with child in need services as part of its children’s social care reforms, in order to improve the quality, timeliness and continuity of family support.

The changes will also enable councils to allocate child in need cases to non-social workers – which is currently prohibited by the Working Together to Safeguard Children statutory guidance – a development Ofsted has previously warned may undermine quality and increase risk.

In today’s report, the three inspectorates said that the lack of capacity in early help “was likely to hinder progress in achieving the full vision of the reforms”.

The JTAIs drew on inspections of front door services, a sample of early help cases, observations of multi-agency meetings and decision making and discussions with families, children, practitioners, managers and leaders, among other sources of evidence.

Ofsted, the CQC and HMICFRS identified “a great deal of good practice in some local areas”.

‘Striking’ variability in practice

However, they said their most striking finding from the JTAIs was the variability between and within the local areas, both in the level of support provided to families and in how it was delivered, they said.

This chimed with previous evidence, with the inspectorates citing research findings from charity Action for Children that early help provision ranged from less than 1% of children to over 15% between areas in 2019-20.

The inspectorates attributed this variation in part to the lack of a statutory framework for early help and the fact that Working Together did not have “clear enough expectations in relation to early help and thresholds”.

Each area took a different approach to the level of intervention that could be provided at either side of the early help-statutory social work threshold, they said.

Delays in referring cases to social care

In some areas, there was no clear process to consider whether the family had reached the threshold for statutory intervention leading, in some cases, to a delay in getting the right help to families.

Inspectors frequently questioned councils and partners on whether stepping cases up to social care might have reduced risks to children sooner.

“Some children’s cases that remained with early help professionals would clearly have benefited from statutory social work intervention because there was a higher level of risk or because their situation was not improving,” the report added.

Early help staff ‘working with increasing complexity’

Early help professionals were “increasingly working with highly complex family situations” that were sometimes “above a level that they felt was appropriate for them”.

“Those families needed the professional expertise of a social worker and more robust oversight through reviews and monitoring of plans,” the inspectorates said.

They called for consistent expectations about early help practitioners’ skills, training and experience, underpinned by high-quality, reflective supervision.

However, they added that “having an effective and skilled workforce depends on there being adequate staff capacity”, which was lacking in the agencies inspected.

Information sharing problems

In some cases, there was no lead professional co-ordinating multi-agency work, which led to agencies working in silos and poor information sharing about risks.

This was exacerbated by barriers in accessing information across agencies, with information about family mental health being often being difficult to source when practitioners were making safeguarding checks.

Lack of effective joint working also led to work being duplicated and families facing repeat assessments, taking away from a focus on the interventions they needed, inspectors found.

Inadequate information sharing was underpinned in some cases by poor recording, with some areas not recording information about the child’s ethnicity, culture or religion, the report said.

Need for improved consistency

The inspectorates concluded: “We saw well-trained and knowledgeable early help workers from a range of agencies undertaking effective work with children and families, meeting need and reducing risk.

“However, this was not consistent. More needs to be done to ensure that all professionals have the skills and knowledge to assess, help and safeguard children and families effectively.”

To address variations in early help provision, the DfE plans to introduce clearer guidance on eligibility for family help, so there is “consistent national understanding of who should receive this support, but local areas can meet families’ needs flexibly”.

This will be tested through its current families first for children pathfinders, who are trialling the family help model.

‘Simply not enough money in the system’

The Association of Directors of Children’s Services said it welcomed the focus on early help in the government’s strategy but it needed to be met with sufficient funding, both to meet existing need and deliver on the reforms.

“There is no doubt the earlier we work with children and their families to overcome the issues they face, the less impact these challenges may have on their lives, and on society,” said vice president Andy Smith.

“Local authorities are committed to supporting families at the earliest possible opportunity but the current method of funding children’s services doesn’t enable this approach in all local areas; there is simply not enough funding in the system to meet the level of need in our communities.

“Too often funding is competitive or time limited, which means not all children benefit and future funding is uncertain, or it is taken out of the system and into the hands of private equity firms, profiteering on the backs of vulnerable children. The government must address this.

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 

Photo: New Africa/Adobe Stock

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

Photo: MichaelJBerlin/Adobe Stock

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

Care review lead Josh MacAlister has been appointed to co-lead a new merged evidence body for children’s social care and early intervention with children and families.

The ex-Frontline chief executive will become executive chair of the organisation merging What Works for Children’s Social Care and the Early Intevention Foundation (EIF) in December. The EIF’s chief executive, Jo Casebourne, will take on the same role in the new body, whose working title is What Works for Early Intervention and Children’s Social Care and which will be established during the winter.

MacAlister is currently working as an adviser to the Department for Education on the implementation of the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, which he led and delivered its final report in May. The DfE is due to announce its response to this review, and those of the Competition and Markets Authority into the children’s social care market and the Children’s Safeguarding Review Panel into the murders of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson, by the end of the year.

‘A great privilege and a huge opportunity’

Commenting on his appointment, he said: “It is a great privilege to take up this role, and a huge opportunity. Very many important decisions about the new centre, its strategic priorities and its work lie ahead. I am looking forward to working with partners across early intervention and children’s social care to make sure the new organisation serves and supports professionals and services providing help to children and families, at a national and local level.”

Funded by the DfE, What Works’ role is to identify evidence for what contributes to improved outcomes for children in the social care system, through carrying out its own research, and synthesising and disseminating others’ findings. Set up in 2013, the EIF  performs a similar role in relation to the evidence on intervening early to improve the lives of children and young people at risk of poor outcomes. It is mostly government funded.

Both organisations carried out research and provided evidence to the care review, which recommended their merger due to their “very significant overlaps”. This was also in line with the review’s key recommendation to set up a “family help” service, in effect merging targeted early help provision with child in need services.

Merged body ‘better placed to support care review reforms’

Jenny Coles

The two organisations’ boards of trustees agreed the merger in July. In a blog post setting out the reasons at the time, What Works chair Jenny Coles, formerly director of children’s services at Hertfordshire council, said: “As a single organisation, we will be better placed to support the direction of travel following the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care and the ambitions to bring together and strengthen direct support available to families across the early help and social work systems. Our merged organisation will be able to support the reforms ahead and help create a system that is both evidence-based and evidence-generating.”

Following her appointment to lead the merged body, Casebourne, chief executive of the EIF since 2017, said: “I know there is a firm commitment across the early intervention and children’s social care community to ensure that the system makes a difference for children, and we have an exciting opportunity to help shape and support that wider system as it evolves. As a trusted and independent source of information and guidance for practitioners, and a critical friend to those who are making crucial decisions about investments, policies and programmes, we will work to ensure that the lessons from evidence and research are an essential part of how support for families and children is designed and implemented.”