New ADCS chief urges sector to rally over funding for children
Neil Puffett
Tuesday, March 28, 2017
Association of Directors of Children's Services president Alison Michalska says agencies must work together to convince government to invest more in services, while councils must get greater powers to influence education.
Concerns about the twin pressures of rising demand and reduced funding for children's services have been a consistent theme for presidents of the Association of Directors of Children's Services (ADCS) in recent years.
Total revenue expenditure of local authorities in England fell from £104.3bn in 2010/11 to £94.5bn in 2015/16, while in the same period, the annual number of children entering the care system increased from 27,310 to 32,050. For the time being at least, the trend seems set to continue.
Latest Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service figures show that the number of care applications in 2016/17 has surpassed last year's record tally with a month to spare.
Meanwhile, analysis by the Local Government Association projects that children's services will see a £1.9bn gap emerge between funding and need from 2016/17 to 2019/20.
So it is not surprising that the issue of resources is one of Alison Michalska's four priorities for her year as ADCS president, which begins on 1 April.
Campaign boosts funding
It would appear Michalska, who succeeds Essex director of children's services Dave Hill as president, takes solace in the success of a recent campaign to boost funding for adult social care - which resulted in £2bn being allocated to the sector by Chancellor Philip Hammond in the Spring Budget.
She is keen for all agencies working with children to create a joint narrative to persuade central government to loosen its purse strings.
"The NHS and adult social care services have come together to tell the same story [for adult social care]," she says.
"I think it has become a big powerful voice because two voices have come together rather than arguing against each other.
"Across the children's sector, we are not having that persistent coherent narrative."
Unified push
Michalska is keen on creating a slogan to push a unified case - mooting the idea of appropriating the Conservative government's phrase of "a country that works for everyone", but turning it around to focus on children and young people.
"We could tweak it and say ‘a country that works for its children'," she suggests.
"That's the narrative we want and we want to get the children's voluntary sector, private providers, schools and local authorities behind it."
If in terms of resources Michalska is seeking to reinvigorate an existing debate, another of her priorities is to reassert local authority influence in an area she feels has been neglected for some time - education.
"ADCS has increasingly focused on very vulnerable children and children in care," says Michalska, who has been director of children's services at Nottingham City Council since 2013. "To some extent, the local authority role in education has diminished."
She wants to see councils given greater powers over school place planning - they are responsible for ensuring sufficient places, but cannot currently force academies to expand - and lead the way on how the education system develops.
"It seems the government is realising that unless someone cares about the area as a whole, there is no real co-ordination. I think that is a space for us to get into."
She says that the government is currently considering former ADCS president Alan Wood's review into of the role of local authorities in relation to children. She adds that the indication, based on discussions and submissions to that review, is that academy chiefs are keen on councils getting more involved in education.
Preparing for adulthood
She also points to the fact that there has been a shift away from the "hardline academic" approach to education, adopted by former Education Secretary Michael Gove, to one of "preparing children for adulthood".
"Personal, social, health and economic education is coming back into the curriculum - good GCSEs and A-Levels is one route for young people, but it is not the only route," she says.
"We have increasingly become marginalised and ‘out of it'. We want to make sure our leadership offer - through DCSs and lead members - comes through designing the role of education.
"We have moved away as the money and focus has gone missing, but we are missing a trick if we don't give that strong systems leadership through education - particularly through place planning.
"Local authorities have a real role to play in education."
She is also keen to maintain efforts to address the issue of young people in care being placed long distances from their home area - so-called "distance placements".
This will involve pursuing recommendations in Sir Martin Narey's review of residential care for better local provision of children's homes, as well as suggesting ways of improving the foster care system as part of the government's fostering stocktake.
Regional commissioning
She suggests regional commissioning arrangements - which are already in place in some areas - can help, but also wants to see local authorities expand their own residential care provision, rather than rely on independent provision.
In those cases where distance placements are necessary, what is needed is better information sharing with other local authorities and schools so children are not "abandoned".
"Otherwise, we are doing our children a great disservice," she says.
Her other priority is to "mobilise knowledge" among local authorities on achieving outcomes. She specifically wants to make progress on this in relation to the Department for Education's children's social care innovation programme.
Initially announced by minister for vulnerable children and families Edward Timpson in October 2013, £100m was set aside for projects in the first two years. A further £200m has been made available from 2016 to 2020.
"There has been lots of intervention money," she says.
"Some projects have been good, while others haven't worked, but we have to get that learning out so local authorities know what they need to be investing in."
At the start of 2016, then Education Secretary Nicky Morgan announced plans to create a What Works Centre for children's social care, which is yet to begin operation.
Good practice
Michalska says better co-ordination of the plethora of improvement initiatives across the sector is needed to aid dissemination of good practice.
"The DfE talks about the What Works Centre, but at the moment, it just feels that what has come out hasn't really been coherent," she says.
"There is also a lot of work that ADCS has done through peer reviews and peer challenge that we haven't necessarily been that good at sharing outside of the regions.
"We owe it to ourselves and children to be much clearer about what we have to do, what works and what doesn't work."
MICHALSKA ON…
The possibility of Ofsted scrapping overall inspection judgments for children's services:
"In an ideal world, the judgments would be narrative - not one word. The complexity and all the work can't be summed up in one word. Losing the overall judgment - if it gets away from labelling services with one word - has to be the right thing. I think anything that allows for more narrative around areas that are not yet good is better than one-word judgments."
Testing Ofsted's new social care inspection framework in her local authority:
"It was really tough, and Ofsted found it very difficult as well, but it was the most authentic inspection I have been involved with. They picked 280 cases and just followed their noses - they went off where it took them. There was no way you could stage manage it or put forward your best workers. It felt very different and incredibly fair."
Whether local authorities have the capacity to take child refugees:
"We haven't been very publicly shouting about money because it isn't very humanitarian, but the money is an issue. In Nottingham, I haven't got a spare internal foster placement, so if I were to place a child refugee, it would have to be in an external foster placement. The Home Office money [to cover the cost of local authorities caring for child refugees] barely covers the cost of an internal placement, let alone an independent fostering agency placement, which is probably twice as much. We don't have any capacity within our own provision, therefore funding is inadequate."
The introduction of mandatory reporting of suspected child abuse:
"It is six months now [since the end of the government consultation] and nothing has come out on mandatory reporting, so hopefully they are not going to do anything. It isn't the right thing to be doing. It seems like a sledgehammer to crack a nut and has such potential for unintended consequences."
The proposed new social work accreditation system:
"If we are going to go down that route, it has got to be mandatory and done at speed. If it takes a long time to roll out, it is going to create a lot of problems. The Department for Education has been a bit late inviting ADCS to the party, but it now appears to be far more open to discussion. There certainly seems to be a willingness to consider our views. There is some realisation that perhaps some of this hasn't hit the spot and needs some rethinking."