Day: March 16, 2025

Prof Ray Jones Briefing for LSWG on possible impact of Clauses 3 and 10 of Children’s Wellbeing Bill

There is much which is positive in the recent review in England of children’s social services, including the call to reverse the funding cuts of the past 14 years and the focus on family support and on kinship care, but with a few concerns and anxieties as well:

HOLDING BACK EXPERIENCED SOCIAL WORKERS AS EXCLUSIVELY CHILD PROTECTION SOCIAL WORKERS

The proposal, which was accepted by the Conservative government and which continues to be piloted and promoted by the new Labour government of holding back experienced social workers to only become involved with families when there are child protection investigations and plans has all the warning bells of unintended consequences:

  1. The thrust of the MacAlister review to provide more help for families when they start to struggle will be undermined by even more families, usually in the midst of significant poverty and deprivation, being drawn into child protection processes and procedures as the means of getting attention and engagement from experienced social workers.
  2. Other workers and agencies will talk up concerns about families as child protection concerns to get any involvement from, and the insurance cover of the involvement of, experienced social workers. But all the families will get is continuing contact with less experienced and confident workers with experienced social workers being held back and limited and trapped in monitoring and surveillance roles.
  3. The social workers in the specialist child protection multi-disciplinary teams will be more centrally located as specialist teams need to cover a wider area. They will be more remote from communities, will not have local knowledge of neighbourhood networks, and will have much more limited relationships with early years services, neighbourhood police officers, GPs, health visitors, youth workers, schools etc within a community area. In essence they will parachute in to do a child protection investigation with limited local intelligence and then leave.
  4. There has over the past 14 years been an exponential growth in child protection investigations (+152% since 2009-2010), but only 33% lead to child protection case conference. In effect, families have had the threatening intrusion of a child protection investigation with no significant concerns then found about the care of their children.
  5. Even when there are concerns leading to child protection plans these are not about physical abuse (7%) or sexual abuse (4%) but about emotional abuse (37%) and especially neglect (49%), which are heavily related to families under stress and going under when immersed in longer term poverty with no light at the end of the tunnel. These families need help not the anxiety-provoking and harassing oversight of child protection plans by this new breed of exclusively child protection social workers and remote multi-disciplinary teams.
  6. Directors of children’s services, Ofsted and BASW https://www.communitycare.co.uk/2024/04/10/seven-more-councils-chosen-to-test-family-support-and-child-protection-reforms/ have expressed their concerns about this direction of travel which seems to have been accepted by the government and the reports from the initial pilots is that is has been difficult to recruit and retain experienced social workers to take on this skewed role.

CONTINUING TO ALLOW PRIVATE FOR-PROFIT PROVISION OF CHILDREN’S SOCIAL CARE

Unlike in Scotland and Wales (and unlike in practice Northern Ireland) England has not turned away from private companies providing residential and foster care for children. BIG profits are being taken from the public funding for children’s care services whilst poorer quality care is provided remote from children’s families and at a distance from the children’s social workers.

The MacAlister review commented on this concern but the recommendation was for the better commissioning and purchasing of private sector services through regional commissioning and purchasing consortia. This will only make it worse – local authorities and social workers will have even less knowledge of the private sector placements they are making. Not only will the placements be at a distance but the commissioning will also be at a distance.

This tanker of privatisation does need to be turned! Two ways forward whilst not a big bang destabilisation of current arrangements on which local authorities have become dependent, so a softly softly approach is necessary:

• Make available a larger capital grant to local authorities to rebuild their own local capacity in residential children’s homes and require local authorities to file an annual report with the DfE on their plans and progress in having sufficiency in directly managed and provided local children’s care services.
• Have a requirement within the national data sets and performance measures to report on what proportion of children ‘looked after’ are within foster care and residential services directly managed by the local authority, and have as a part of Ofsted inspections and each local authority report a focus on whether children are being cared for within the local authority’s own area.

Ray Jones
16.1.2025

Prof Mike Stein Briefing on Children’s Wellbeing Bill

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill: evidence for the Public Bill Committee (February 2025)
Mike Stein

Summary
• The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill includes important and welcome measures to improve the lives of children in need of help, protection and those living in and leaving care.

• To ensure all children and young people are able to fulfil their potential will require Government action to address child poverty, end austerity and rebuild public services. These are the foundations stones upon which the legislation must build to transform children’s lives

• By ratifying the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) the UK have endorsed a commitment to ensure all children:

• have the right to live free from poverty

• are entitled to be protected; to participate in decisions which shape their lives, and; to be provided with services to meet their needs

• Paragraphs 6 to 14 (in italics) contain the main recommendations

Mike Stein is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Social Policy and Social Work at the University of York. A qualified social worker, he worked in probation and children’s services. From 1975 at Leeds and 1995 at York University, Mike has carried out and directed pioneering research studies: on young people leaving care, in the UK and internationally; the neglect and maltreatment of teenagers, and; those who go missing from home and care. Mike has also been involved in the preparation of Guidance and training materials for Leaving Care legislation, including the Children Act 1989, the Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000 and Planning Transition to Adulthood for Care Leavers, 2010. He acted as the academic adviser to the Quality Protects research initiative and was a member of the Laming Review on ‘Keeping Children in Care out of Trouble’. This evidence, submitted in a personal professional capacity, arises from Mike’s long standing commitment to promoting the rights of young people through research, policy and practice.

The right to live free from poverty
1. In response to the increase in children living in relative and extreme poverty (destitution) since 2010 (over 700,000 increase since 2010, currently over 4 million children, including 1.8 million children in destitution) and MP’s concerns about the impact of the two child limit on benefits, the Government set up a ministerial Child Poverty Taskforce in July 2024 (supported by a Child Poverty Unit in the Cabinet Office), and due to report in ‘spring 2025’.

2. The taskforce is an opportunity to consider the comprehensive evidence of the impact of poverty: how poverty severely damages children’s health, education and wellbeing and is closely associated with an increased demand for children’s services, and is causally associated with children coming into care.

3. The policy implications include: the need to reverse the two-child limit on benefits, end the benefit cap and introduce an ‘essentials guarantee’, to ensure all families have enough income to meet their needs without having to resort to the indignity of charitable aid.

4. The Government have made a general commitment to end austerity and rebuild public services (September, 2024). Since 2010 the Conservative government’s austerity policies, including major reductions in local authority funding, have had a devastating impact upon children’s services. This has included cutting the Sure Start programme, major reductions in local authority family help, substantial cuts to youth services and the rationing of young people’s mental health provision.

5. This has resulted – in conjunction with the rises in child and family poverty – in increased demands for a range of preventative services, high levels of unmet needs until they reach crisis levels, and entirely ‘preventable’ additional numbers of children coming into care. This is the context for the implementation of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.

6. The Government’s Child Poverty Taskforce should detail evidence of the impact of child poverty and inequality on children’s health, education and wellbeing and introduce comprehensive proposals for addressing these in conjunction with the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

The right to protection
7. In a Bill designed to protect children, and in the immediate aftermath of the Sara Sharif tragedy, the removal of the ‘reasonable chastisement’ defence of physically assaulting a child, is urgently overdue

The right to participation
8. Given the welcome direction of policy to enhance the rights of children and young people, the Bill should ‘place a duty’ on the local authority ‘to seek and give due consideration to the wishes and feelings of children’, to participate in family group decision making meetings


The right to provision
9. The Bill should ensure all children in care be legally entitled to receive ‘care’ until they are 18 years of age. At present this is denied to, and discriminates against, many young people, aged 16 and 17 years of age, who are ‘placed’ in poor quality unregulated accommodation, and often exploited, many miles from their families and communities

10. The Bill should ensure the provision of children ‘staying close’ to their accommodation and former carers, entitles them to the same assistance, including financial support, as those ‘staying put’ in foster care: a failure to do so discriminates against the former far more vulnerable group

11. The Bill should extend ‘priority need’ under homelessness legislation for care leavers from 18 years up to 25 years of age

12. The Bill should define the purpose, describe the type of regime, detail the funding and stipulate the intended outcomes proposed by Clause 10 –‘widening places where looked after children can be deprived of their liberty under the Children Act 1989’

13. The Bill should introduce measures to end profiteering in the provision of all children’s social care, including residential and foster care placements, children’s homes and any specialist residential provision, to end the ongoing transfer of much needed funding from children’s services

14. The Bill should ensure the provision of a locally based family and community service with experienced qualified social workers, for early help, children in need and child protection work – not just the latter group, as proposed, as this will seriously undermine the Bill’s provision for effective early intervention