On 2nd February 2023, we published our bold and ambitious plans to reform Children’s Social Care. Our implementation strategy, ‘Stable Homes, Built on Love’ set out our plans to transform Children’s Social Care, and provides a vision for how we will keep children safe, help families overcome challenges; and make sure children in care have stable, loving homes, long-term loving relationships, and opportunities for a good life.
Alongside this strategy, we launched three consultations asking for views on: our proposals for reform, our draft Children’s Social Care National Framework and Dashboard, and our plan for addressing the high use of agency social workers in the workforce. All three consultations closed on the 11th May 2023, and this statement provides an update to the House on our progress in considering the views we have heard. I am pleased to say that today we are publishing responses to the first two consultations. We will publish a response to our social worker workforce consultation later this year.
Today represents a moment to reflect on the thousands of people who generously shared their views through these consultations, including those with personal experience of the care system, children and families, dedicated professionals and practitioners, foster carers, kinship carers, senior local authority leaders, and charities. I give my personal thanks to everyone who contributed, particularly those who shared their own stories and participated in the events we hosted.
Consultation on proposals set out in ‘Stable Homes, Built on Love’
The consultation on our strategy has reaffirmed widespread support for our reforms in Children’s Social Care. Many respondents agreed with our emphasis on family help, our proposed multi-agency approach to safeguarding, and our commitment to supporting kinship carers. They also supported our ‘missions’ for care leavers, and our recognition of the value of social workers, including proposals to improve recruitment and retention.
We have made good progress in delivering the vision of Stable Homes, Built on Love. We recently announced the first local authority areas to take part in the ‘Families First for Children’ Pathfinder and Family Network Pilots. These areas will help us co-create a new model for family help, and test and learn what works. We have launched a consultation on our statutory guidance, ‘Working Together to Safeguard Children’, and begun to invest £9 million in a national support and training offer for kinship carers.
I am pleased to announce we have also launched a consultation on National Standards and Statutory Guidance for Advocacy today. Alongside this, I am pleased to inform the House that we are working with the North East region to deliver a foster care recruitment and retention programme in recognition of the vital role that foster carers play in so many children’s lives, and we are funding £24m to enable up to 50% of all Local Authorities in England to implement their own regional recruitment and retention programmes. Furthermore, we are also investing £10m to test new initiatives to address the longest delays in family courts and we will be working with 27 more local authorities to deliver the Staying Close programme which provides support for young people leaving children’s homes, building on a further investment of £16.2m we made at the Spring Budget.
From our consultation, we also know there are areas we need to go further, and where we need to make available more detail on how we intend to deliver reform. We will work in partnership with the sector to design and deliver Regional Care Cooperatives (RCCs) so that they achieve the long-term benefits of forecasting sufficiency of children’s homes placements. I am committed to doing this as we invite applications to set up RCCs. RCCs present a radical shift from the existing approach to commissioning and delivering care placements. We believe that this level of change is necessary to truly reform the system so that it works for the children and young people who need a stable, loving home.
We must be ambitious for children in care and care leavers – to help them recover, thrive and achieve their potential into adulthood. We will implement improvements to recruitment and retention of practitioners in the workforce to ensure they have the capacity to deliver the services children and families need, and work with relevant partners to ensure a greater focus on wider interdependent services, particularly mental health support.
Throughout the consultation, we heard that further investment will be key to delivering reform and giving those who work in children’s social care the capacity to transform the help available for children and families. The £200m investment, announced alongside the strategy, will set the path for longer term reform and builds on investments this Government has already made. For example, the £259m to increase the number of places in open and secure children’s homes, £160m to deliver our Adoption Strategy, £142m to introduce new national standards and Ofsted registration and inspection requirements for unregulated supported accommodation, and over £230m over this spending review to support young people leaving care with housing, access to education, employment, and training.
Consultation on the Children’s Social Care National framework and Dashboard
Alongside Stable Homes, Built on Love, we consulted on the new National Framework for Children’s Social Care, which describes the outcomes that local authorities should achieve so that children and young people can grow up to thrive. In addition, we have consulted on the indicators for the new Children's Social Care Dashboard, which will be a tool for learning and development for both local and central government. This will help us improve our understanding of what works in social work practice across Children’s Social Care.
During the consultation, there was broad support for the intention of the National Framework in setting consistent expectations of the outcomes that local authorities should achieve in children's social care. Respondents to the consultation felt that the four outcomes in the National Framework were broadly the right ones. However, they were clear that the National Framework could be more user friendly, give greater visibility to the role of practice supervisors and that a separate version should be created that can be used with children and young people.
We heard clearly that partnership working is crucial to effective support for families, so we will introduce a new chapter on how multi-agency working enables positive outcomes. We also heard that building trusted relationships with whole families and their networks is crucial to practice, so we will emphasise this in the guidance and strengthen the focus on how practitioners can meet the individual needs of children and young people.
During the consultation we sought views on what indicators would help understand the outcomes and enablers within the National Framework. We recognise that practice is complex and sensitive, and developing a full set of indicators, which can genuinely offer insights into how local authorities are working towards the outcomes of the National Framework, will take time – and we are reviewing what indicators to include within the Dashboard. We heard that some indicators could be misleading if viewed in isolation or without wider context and will be mindful of how we present data, and how the Dashboard is used. We remain committed to the Dashboard as a tool for learning.
Following the consultation, the National Framework will be issued as statutory guidance by the end of the year, along with plans to support local authorities to embed the guidance in practice. We will issue the National Framework alongside the revised guidance, Working Together to Safeguard Children, which is also being consulted on. The Dashboard roll-out will be phased from 2024, allowing us to iterate it, as we test, learn and evaluate.
Delivering reform
We are committed to transformational, whole system change. As we deliver the commitments set out in “Stable Homes, Built on Love”, we will prioritise working with partners in the system to ensure reform leads to long-lasting positive changes for all children, young people, and their families.
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