Government's underfunded 'piecemeal' response won't fix children's social care crisis

Published by Professional Social Work magazine, 2 February, 2023

The government’s much-anticipated strategy for children’s social care in England fails to deliver the funding needed to fix a system in crisis, sector leaders have warned.

The strategy, published earlier this month, was in response to two key reviews and claims to “put families at the heart of reform” with a focus on early support.

It proposes investing £200 million over the next two years, far short of the £2.6 billion over four years recommended by the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care (IRCSC).

A central plank of the government’s strategy, which is under consultation until 11 May, is to improve family help. Community-based, multi-disciplinary pathfinders funded by £45 million at 12 local authorities will be tested from September.

Those that are successful will be scaled up and new legislation introduced.

But BASW warned this could create a “postcode lottery”, adding the government’s plans were “only a piecemeal approach to tackling longstanding issues within children’s care”.

The association said in a statement: “It looks unlikely to deliver the serious strategy we hope for, prioritising much needed funding and a comprehensive plan to fix workload, the experience of children and families, and the crisis in the workforce.”

The IRCSC’s final report published last May called for a “radical reset” of the system, backed by some 80 recommendations.

It said a “revolution in family help” was needed to reverse an upward trend of children going into care reaching a peak of 82,170 last year and predicted to hit 100,000 by 2025.

The review’s chair Josh MacAlister said the government’s strategy, called Stable Homes, Built on Love, needed to go “further and faster”.

Writing in a blog, he said: “The annual cost of our children’s social care system will rise from £10 to £15 billion per year, plus many billions more from the price of health care, crime and other disadvantages these children face.

“Taking transformational action now will cost money — £2.6 billion over four years — but it will save the taxpayer soon after.

“The government’s plans get us started down the right path, but it must go further and faster to reach the tipping point.”

Katharine Sacks-Jones, chief executive of children in care charity Become, said she was “extremely disappointed that the government is choosing to invest so little in our country’s most vulnerable children”.

Adoption UK also criticised the funding. Chief executive officer Emily Frith said: “The plan commits £200 million to be spend on the reforms, which falls short of the reviews recommended £2 billion over the next five years, meaning many of the plan’s ambitions will have to wait until the next spending round.”

Cllr James Jamieson, chair of the Local Government Association said: “The funding announced, while helpful, falls short of addressing the £1.6 billion shortfall – estimated prior to inflation – required each year simply to maintain current service levels.”

The focus on family help will be backed by the creation of new family help workers and a knowledge and skills statement setting out their core competencies.

Another key recommendation of the MacAlister review was to create a new post of expert child protection practitioner held by social workers with at least five years’ experience. Greater expertise in handling complex child protection cases was also a recommendation of the Hobson and Labinjo-Hughes Child Safeguarding Practice Review, published days after the IRCSC. It called for investigative multi-agency child protection teams to be established in every local authority.

The government is adopting the IRCSC’s recommendation, with plans is to create a child protection lead practitioner role. These will be experienced social workers supporting family help practitioners when concerns about significant harm arise.

There will also be more support for kinship carers – something called for in the MacAlister review. The government plans to publish a national kinship care strategy by 2023 and invest £9 million on kinship care training and support.

However, this falls short of paying kinship carers, as recommended in the review and called for by kinship carers. Instead, the government will “explore the case for a new financial allowance” and an extension of legal aid.

The government said it will invest £27 million to recruit more foster carers over the next two years, much less than MacAlister’s recommendation of 9,000 new foster carers backed by a £82 million programme of support.

However, it pledged to introduce an “above-inflation” increase to the allowance for foster carers.

An Early Career Framework recommended by MacAlister to provide clearer pathways for new social workers is being adopted.

It will replace the Supported Year in Employment (ASYE), providing extended support and assessments of newly qualified social workers through their first two years.

The government the new assessment would “learn from what did and did not work” in the scrapped National Assessment and Accreditation Scheme.

It is envisaged the framework will eventually be extended to ‘expert practitioner’ level covering workers in practice between three and five years.

However, the IRCSC's recommendation that the framework is linked to a national pay scale for social workers was not adopted.

The government plans to recruit an additional 500 children and family social worker apprentices to help address chronic staffing issues that leave one in five children’s social worker posts in England currently unfilled.

It pledged to explore ways to make the recruitment of social workers from abroad “as straightforward as possible”.

A national virtual hub with resources on how to improve the working conditions and wellbeing of social workers will be created and annual social work health checks by local authorities enhanced.

The government will also consult on a plan to reduce reliance on agency social workers, currently 16.7 per cent of the workforce in England.

This will include national rules from September on how they should be used and a potential price cap, building on memoranda of undestandings already adopted by local authorities in some regions. Other proposals include making it mandatory to have worked at least five years within local authority children's services before going agency and ending the use of whole 'project teams' demanded by some agencies.

However, Steve Crocker, president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, said: “Local authorities are facing real recruitment and retention challenges now, particularly amongst our social workers which, in the short term, is leading to an increasing reliance upon agency staff to help us meet the growing levels of need we are seeing across our communities.”

The government said it will invest £30 million in “family finding, befriending and mentoring programmes” to support children in care and care leavers to “find and maintain loving relationships”.

The leaving care allowance given to young care leavers to help set themselves up will also be increased from £2,000 to £3,000 from this April.

A recommendation in the MacAlister review to make care experience a protected characteristic was not adopted.

Nor has the government answered calls from care experienced people to extend care to 16 and 17-year-olds in supported accommodation. Instead, it plans to introduce new ‘quality standards’ to be regulated by Ofsted.

Like the IRCSC and the Competition and Markets Authority, the government does not advocate a cap on profit-making by privately-run children’s homes, blamed for spiralling costs. Instead, it adopts the IRCSC’s recommendation of creating a network of Regional Care Cooperatives to better manage commissioning, funding and planning of care places.

To ease workload pressures on social workers, a National Workload Action Group will be set up this spring. It will be tasked with looking at removing “unnecessary workload pressures that do not lead to improved outcomes for children and families”.

A study will also be launched this spring with two local authorities examining how case recording can be streamlined so that it “reduces the recording burden on social workers and supports rather than hinders, good social work”.

A separate project with two other local authorities will work with software companies to “reimagine” how information is recorded, shared and analysed. A data strategy will be published at the end of this year.

A recommendation in the review that social work managers and leaders must do at least 100-hours of practice a year to retain accreditation was rejected by the government.

The IRCSC recommended scrapping independent reviewing officers (IROs), believing they are not free enough to challenge their employing local authority on behalf of children.

It suggested replacing them with advocates overseen by the Children’s Commissioner. This was rejected by the government. Instead, it will review the effectiveness of IROs and regulation 44 visitors who provide checks on residential children’s homes.

A new formula for funding local authority services for children and young people is to be explored and a Children’s Social Care National Framework introduced.

The latter will set out the outcomes for children’s social care to ensure greater consistency across the country. A group of experts chaired by England's chief social worker for children and families Isabelle Trowler and including Social Work England's chief executive Colum Conway has been established to lead on this.

The government’s response does little to address the underlying cause that social workers say often results in families needing social care support, such as poverty and the increasing cost of living.

While this was outside the remit of the MacAlister review, it nevertheless urged the government to “explicitly recognise” the impact of poverty and inequality and to “have a wider plan to address them”.

The government said it will seek to improve social workers’ ability to use the Household Support Fund to support families living in deprivation.

It added the new Children’s Social Care National Framework will “emphasise the importance of anti-discriminatory and poverty-aware practice”.

Read the government's detailed strategy Stable Homes, Built on Love.