Children's leaders gather to tackle major issues at ADCS conference

Children's services leaders gathered at the Association of Directors of Children's Services annual conference to debate the key issues affecting children, young people and families, and hear from policy makers about their vision for the future.

Here are the main talking points from the event.

Improving the care system

Children and families minister Edward Timpson outlined what the government's key priorities will be over the coming parliament.

Although short on detail, Timpson told directors that key reforms to children's social care will be taken "to a whole new level" over the coming years.

On system reforms, Timpson said more needs to be done to speed up the adoption process and reduce delays to finding vulnerable children permanent homes.

He reiterated the government's belief that recent rulings in adoption cases had not changed the way judges are interpreting the Children Act 1989.

He added: "Many of you tell us that recent court judgments have knocked your confidence when it comes to assessing whether adoption is the best option for children. In fact, I would argue you have every reason to be more confident.

"Last December, in a new court judgment, the president of the family court made it absolutely clear that the law on adoption has not changed. Where it is in the child's best interest, adoption must be pursued.

"So I urge you all to ensure this message has been heard loud and clear across your organisations."

Timpson said that while the average time children wait to be adopted has fallen by four months, 3,000 children are still waiting to be adopted.

He said he is "determined to tear down the barriers to adoption" and confidently predicted that the government's introduction of regional adoption agencies and the £30m investment to pay for inter-agency adoption fees will help deliver that.

He said he was "delighted" by the response to the adoption proposals from councils, and urged them to also bid for a share of the £19m adoption support fund, which since May has seen "around 330 families benefiting by receiving therapeutic support".

"I'm receiving regular reports on who is using and not using the fund," said Timpson. "I would urge authorities that have not applied to make the most of this resource and ensure those who need it can access it."

Timpson said he is also going to prioritise honing leadership skills and gathering evidence of service outcomes over the parliament.

To this end, "renewing our efforts to go further and unleash our innovation around the system, so that we not only protect vulnerable children and support families, but set them up for fulfilling and happy lives" would be key, he added.

Timpson said he is "genuinely delighted" with the response to the previous coalition government's children's social care innovation fund programme, launched in 2013, and announced that almost half of councils are involved in projects funded through the £100m initiative.

"These schemes offer the opportunity to reshape the whole system," he said.

"If it works, we have to think hard about how we share that experience with other areas.

"I'm keen to push this excellence in enterprise up another gear - supporting new models of delivery across city regions, trusts and combined authorities."

Although Timpson avoided answering a question from the audience on whether the funding would be repeated, those involved in innovation fund projects said they are hopeful the DfE will provide additional support.

Children's health priorities

Jon Rouse, director general for social care at the Department for Health, told delegates that tackling childhood obesity and mental health problems are key priorities for the health service over the coming years.

Rouse likened the challenges on children and young people's mental health to those of "smoking, drinking and drug taking" that society had "grappled with in the previous decade".

"We should be very concerned about what is happening with young people's mental health," he said. "There are growing pressures from a young age: the impact of cyberbullying, concerns about levels of self-harm and eating disorders."

Rouse, who chaired the previous government's Mental Health Taskforce, said the tiered model of child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) is out of date and "impenetrable to young people and families".

It also "leads to service rationing and fragmentation in the way services are received and accessed", he said.

The taskforce recommendations led to the coalition announcing new funding and access targets for CAMHS, and Rouse says NHS England will shortly publish guidance for each locality to draw up a transformation plan for children's mental health services "to ensure we have improvement over the next three to five years".

Improving child mental health is one of six priority areas for the health service. Others include improving maternity care; tackling childhood obesity; improving child protection; developing more integrated care; and improving the quality of the workforce.

On obesity, Rouse said there is mounting evidence that the issue affects deprived children and young people more severely than their wealthier peers. He said the challenge for children's services leaders is to ensure that the "cultural shift" in how the middle classes view their health is carried over to less well-off groups.

"The fact that 48 per cent of 16- to 24-year-olds use fitness Apps on a regular basis tells you something is going on in society we can tap into," he said.

"But that won't make a difference to those groups that are most excluded and least able to access it. That's a big challenge in this area."

However, he said improvements to health education over the past decade had resulted in sustained reductions in drinking, smoking and drug taking, with children now having the self-confidence to make "good decisions about these fundamentals of their health".

Social work training reforms

Sir Martin Narey, the government's adviser on adoption and social work, told delegates that further reforms to social worker training are needed.

He said that now chief social worker Isabelle Trowler's knowledge and skills statement has been published, there needs to be more evidence that universities are responding to it and "demonstrating that they are adjusting their curriculum".

He also called for a more rigorous approval process for university courses, something currently carried out by the Health & Care Professions Council (HCPC).

"We have some excellent universities producing some excellent social workers," Narey said. "But it's an open secret we have some which are producing too many students of relatively poor calibre, where class sizes are too large and where too many social workers will not move into the profession because you will not want to employ them.

"We need either a wholly transformed and more rigorous approval process by the HCPC or a new process altogether."

Narey also said a debate is needed on whether children's social workers' university education should be dedicated solely to the skills they need to protect children.

He said that although his January 2014 report for government on improving social work education proposed retaining a single degree for both children's and adult's social work, with a second year of academic study dedicated to children's issues, he now sees the need to go further.

"Of course there is a great deal of common ground between adult and children's social work, but 70 per cent of adult social work is now dedicated to the elderly and demographic changes will further separate the two sides of the profession.

"We can't any longer justify the inevitable compromises in a degree that tries to cover children's and adult issues in equal measure, and in just two academic years."

Speaking about the role of director of children's services (DCS), he said that while he believes directors do a good job in difficult circumstances, there is "no reason why leadership can't be improved".

"Your jobs are extremely challenging," he told delegates. "In my view, we need to allow the post of DCS to be opened up to more people from outside the social work profession.

"Not being part of the profession can sometimes be liberating. It allows you to ask questions that sometimes a professional might not."

Funding cuts increase pressures

ADCS president Alison O'Sullivan used her keynote address to warn that children's services are facing a "looming crisis" because of funding cuts.

She said local government leaders have worked hard to minimise the impact of reducing resources while managing increases in demand, but are now dealing with a "ticking time bomb", because the full impact of cuts to local authority funding are not likely to "wash through the system" for another two or three years.

"There is a looming crisis in relation to our ability to keep a balance in the system between investment in early help and the costs of late intervention," she said.

"Government needs to monitor this closely and consider if steps will need to be taken to ensure we do not do irreversible damage to our ability to prevent serious harm occurring."

O'Sullivan also used her speech to make a fresh call for reform of the way children's services departments are inspected - describing Ofsted's current single inspection framework as "broken and discredited".

And she spoke about the need for further reform of social work training to help drive up the quality and consistency of practice.

"We are not training as many social workers as we need and too few remain in work after they've qualified," she said.

"Some of this can be addressed by the mechanisms that are being introduced by the chief social worker, but there needs to be a fundamental rethink of how we incentivise the right people to become social workers."