Progress, but still much to learn – a reflection on the children’s social care implementation plan

The government’s implementation plan, following the publication of the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, includes some promising commitments in this area.  

We welcome the ambition that ‘every child and family who needs it will have access to high-quality help’. However, there’s a lack of clarity on exactly what the government mean by ‘good quality family support’, as well as the steps needed to make sure it’s available. 

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We also shouldn’t underestimate the efforts and resources that will be needed to make sure the strongest and best-evidenced interventions are offered as part of family help. We know high quality, carefully targeted support can help families to stay together, mitigate the impact of stress and adversity, and help children to thrive. 

Our previous work has found that there are programmes which have shown an impact on abuse and neglect, or on outcomes at the edge of care. But, significant resources will be needed to make these more widely available and it’s not clear from the implementation plan where this resource will come from.

However, if we’re to achieve the ambitions of this plan, then it’s also important to recognise that there are areas where we currently know too little.

The implementation plan doesn’t address the fact that there’s limited evidence on what’s likely to be most effective in critical areas such as improving outcomes for children in families where there is domestic abuse, neglect or parental substance misuse. 

Until we tackle this by identifying and developing strong intervention models, the aim to make high quality help available to families who need it is likely to escape us.  

We welcome the approach of developing tailored and targeted pathfinders to family help and other reforms in 12 local areas. We’re clear though that these pathfinders need to include robust pilots and evaluations throughout, with time for reflection and learning before changes are rolled out nationwide. 

It’s important not to start implementing interventions across the country without first establishing that those interventions work to improve outcomes. 

Some interventions championed by the review – FDAC (rolled out to ‘every LA who needs one’) Mockingbird (the ‘evidence-based model Mockingbird’) and Staying Close (legislation for this to be a national entitlement) are ones that WWEICSC are currently evaluating. Once that work is finalised, the government should act on the results of these trials and implement what is proven to work. 

We welcome the proposals in Pillar 6 to set a clear national strategy for children’s social care, with clear accountability, fair funding and a focus on a learning loop for improvement with transparent data. 

Providing a clear position about the goals of children’s social care is an important step and can be achieved through a new National Children’s Social Care Framework. Similarly, the move towards developing more consistent metrics for capturing progress against these objectives is useful. We also welcome the commitment to develop Practice Guides, these have the potential to significantly strengthen practice if backed by policy and funding.

The implementation phase is vital to improving outcomes, but much still needs to be thought through. On top of that there are many areas where we still don’t know enough and consequently don’t have the evidence to underpin effective policy.

Dr Jo Casebourne is chief executive of WWEICSC