Four challenges facing England’s children’s social care reforms

Children minister Josh MacAlister recently articulated his vision for the future in an interview with PSW.

He was speaking in the context of a widespread programme of reforms associated with the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools bill and the Family First Programme. 

In the short term it involves the creation of family help services (integrating current early help and social care services); the development of multi-agency child protection teams; and the promotion of family group decision-making as integral throughout contact with children’s services. 

Important reforms are also proposed regarding the care system in relation to regionalising fostering services and ensuring greater support for kinship carers.

MacAlister said he would ultimately like to see relational, strength-based services that intervene earlier and more effectively when families need help. He argued for multi-disciplinary family support services with stronger links to  local communities. 

He told PSW he hoped these could reduce the large numbers of children currently coming into state care through increased support for family networks to keep children within their own families. 

Furthermore, he wants the care system to enable children and young people to leave care with stronger and  enduring relationships.

Most social workers will share these aspirations. They reflect themes that have consistently emerged from long-term debates about an ‘optimum’ child welfare system and specifically the role for  social work. 

Most will also welcome MacAlister’s recognition of the role that poverty plays in shaping children and family’s lives. He also recognised the pressures exerted by current levels of  demand as well as the increasing  complexity of professional  practice. 

There are, however, several  obstacles to the realisation of this vision, in terms of resource availability and the implementation process currently taking place, and a wider conceptual debate about the role of social work.

1.Funding challenges

MacAlister confirmed a financial commitment of £2.6 billion to support a significant remodelling of children’s services. Indeed he had  argued in his review of children’s social care three years ago that £2 billion was needed to stabilise the system after more than decade of austerity. 

But the Institute of Government recently said such funding would not cover the ambitious shake-up policymakers are seeking. In essence, local authorities are implementing these reforms with little extra funding in real terms, and they will therefore only be reorganising existing resources. 

MacAlister recognised that caseloads remain too high and practitioners remain under very considerable pressure. Without genuine extra capacity, achieving a change in the culture of practice with families will be extremely difficult however services are configured.

MacAlister cited the Department for Education’s (DfE) National Workload Action Group. However, its final report argued for a national strategy to provide not just greater capacity but also more administrative support and high-quality supervision.

2.Testing and and evaluating challenges

The challenges around implementation do not relate solely to resources. Both Eileen Munro and Ray Jones argued in the summer of 2025 that these major reforms could be undermined by a lack of testing and evaluation. 

Significant changes to a complex system such as children’s services – itself part of a much larger ecosystem of child welfare – will inevitably carry the risk of multiple unforeseen consequences. 

The government argued  the Pathfinder programme has piloted reforms and that we can learn lessons from these for the wider implementation process. 

But even within this advanced cohort, some local authorities are still at an early stage o fimplementation. The government is funding an evaluation, which produced an ‘early findings’ report in July. 

However, the data could only describe the initial stages, and it is certainly too early for the authors to come to conclusions about the longer-term impact of these reforms. The Family First elements have at least been the subject of early evaluation but other elements, such as reforms to kinship-carers’ support and the regionalisation of fostering, currently remain untested.

3.Multi-agency working challenges

The other major systemic obstacle relates to the creation of multi-agency child protection teams. Unusually, these are explicitly mandated within the Childrens Wellbeing and Schools Bill. Normally such operational detail is left to practice guidance so that it can remain responsive to changing circumstances and be amended more easily than primary legislation. 

There is evidence (from the new Labour years and later development of MASH ) that co-locating multi-agency teams can have a positive impact on practice. It is, however, difficult to see where key safeguarding partners, particularly the police, health and education, will find the resources for this. 

Each of those sectors is under considerable pressure and indeed many of the agencies which deliver those services cover multiple local authorities. For example, larger police forces cover numerous children’s services departments.

The danger is a tokenistic engagement by some of the agencies could undermine the achievement of improved multi-agency working. 

Pressure on partner agencies threatens their contribution, both to child protection work but also to wider family support services. The vision is for family help services to be ultimately based on a series of hubs across the local authority, with strong community links and to be multi-disciplinary in nature. 

Again, the National Evaluation of Sure Start provided evidence of the benefits from such a model but the recruitment of such teams, either directly by local authorities or through secondments, does not feel realistic at a time when services such as CAMHS are struggling to maintain core services in the face of mounting demand.

4.Conceptual challenges

The final area of challenge is more conceptual. Much of the detail in relation to reform of the care system is at an early developmental stage. However, in relation to those elements covered by the Family First programme, four areas need further attention:

• The interface between the family help service and the multi-agency child protection team. The aim of the model is to promote continuity of relationships with families so that even when concerns escalate, the family help service will remain involved alongside the multi-agency child protection team. But the meaning of “alongside” appears to be being interpreted very differently in different local authorities. Despite recently-published government guidance on multi-agency child protection teams, there remains a lack of clarity on the arrangements for managing these often complex, uncertain and fluid situations
• The role of the child protection conference chair. For the past 25 years conferences have been chaired independentlyby experienced practitioners who were not involved in the line management of the case. As such, they were able to bring constructive challenge to the process and have been an important source of expertise within the system. Under the new model this role would potentially disappear. While the DfE has argued there could be still a degree of independence (i.e. a different social worker from the one carrying out the section 47 investigation) there is a danger that independence is compromised and of insufficient recognition of the skills and expertise that current chairs bring to the process.
• The role of social workers and alternatively qualified staff in the family help service. Non-social work qualified staff are a crucial component of the current children’s workforce. However, care needs to be taken that in the name of continuity of relationships such staff are not carrying unreasonable levels of complexity and risk. There is a tension between striving to maintain continuity of workers and not, in so doing, rationalising allocating child protection work to workers without sufficient experience and expertise in this area.
• What constitutes a family decision-making meeting? Family group decision-making is not synonymous with a family group conference. However, it is important that where a full FGC is not used there is nevertheless genuine sharing of power with families and any change is not simply rhetorical. This desire to “work with” rather than “do to” families will require a deeper culture shift in practice that transcends the processes and structures within children’s services department

These conceptual challenges reflect the wider challenges around children’s services reforms. While the aspirations are both laudable and necessary, they risk being undermined by a lack of sufficient funding and evaluation. 

It is hoped that this current  policy phase – often labelled “test and learn” – will embed a genuine culture of dialogue and learning, nationally as well as locally. 

Ultimately the success of these reforms will depend on wider government policy; the degree of funding for the child welfare system; real progress on wider access to affordable housing and an economy that results in significantly lower levels of child poverty than is the case now.

James Blewett is vice chair of BASW’s childrens and families group and is writing in a personal capacity. He is also a senior policy fellow at Kings College London