In its 220-page response to the Independent Review of Children's Social Care, the government lays out plans to “transform” the care system with £200m over two years.
Speaking to CYP Now, minister for children, families and wellbeing Claire Coutinho describes the strategy, titled Stable Homes, Built on Love, as “a fact-finding mission”, with the majority of proposals set to run as pilots until 2026.
Pledges are the subject of three government consultations on the strategy: one on the implementation strategy as a whole; another on plans to curtail the use of agency social workers; and a third on reforms to the children's social care workforce through the introduction of an early career framework (ECF) and dashboard for measuring outcomes for children.
Further key measures include the appointment of 12 pathfinder areas to trial a new early help model for families (see page 10), a £9m package of training and support for kinship carers and £27m worth of measures for foster care including a 12 per cent increase in the national minimum allowance for existing foster carers and a national recruitment and retention drive (see expert views).
Funding concerns
Sector leaders welcome the report's “direction of travel” but raise concerns over the level of funding pledged compared with Care Review chair Josh MacAlister's call for £2.6bn over five years.
Andy Elvin, chief executive of Tact Care, argues that the use of pilots risks the strategy “petering out into nothing”.
“It's good that things are being taken forward but there needs to be a clear way forward long term, that's what we need to see in the background – you can’t just stop here,” he explains.
The Children's Society chief executive Mark Russell agrees.
“Frankly, there just isn't enough resource,” he says, adding that running pilots “knock down the line for two years the decisions on what real investment the system needs”.
Career framework
A key pledge to reform the social work workforce landscape is the introduction of an ECF to replace the current assessed and supported year in employment.
The ECF would offer newly qualified social workers “two years of consistent, high-quality support and development”, according to the report.
However, the plan has drawn comparisons with the controversial introduction of a similar framework for teaching in 2021.
Joe Hanley, lecturer in social work at the Open University, cites a survey by TeacherTapp last year which found that 80 per cent of teachers and mentors felt the training they received was not well designed and just 10 per cent felt it was a good use of time.
An evaluation of the scheme, published by the Department for Education in May 2022, states that “the majority felt the [framework] workload and time commitments were too onerous for it to be effective”.
“All this suggests that there should be extreme caution before introducing the ECF in social work,” Hanley says.
However, Jonathan Rallings, director of policy at the County Councils Network, says the ECF could increase the number of social workers employed by local authorities and reduce the level of use of agency staff.
“The ECF is a good means to make sure that we are a providing professional development for social workers and can better link to pay scales and progression,” he says.
“If the ECF is in place, it will make it easier for local authorities to look at remuneration within their own system and have some clear pointers of what expectations are on staff and how to move forward.”
But Rallings adds that the ECF would have to be “designed carefully, in conjunction with the sector” for it to work.
Outcomes dashboard
By early 2024, the DfE has pledged to deliver a new national framework for children's social care that includes the creation of a dashboard for local authorities to measure key outcome indicators for children.
It will set out the indicators by the end of this year, with the dashboard, to which local authorities will submit data on a quarterly basis, expected to be in place “by the end of this parliament”.
Jo Casebourne, chief executive of What Works for Early Intervention and Children's Social Care – the organisation born from the merger of the Early Intervention Foundation and What Works for Children's Social Care following a recommendation by MacAlister – describes plans for a new national framework and dashboard as “important” and “useful”.
However, she adds that while the year-long implementation stage of both developments is “vital to improving outcomes, much still needs to be thought through”.
“There are many areas where we still don't know enough and consequently don't have the evidence to underpin effective policy,” she says.
IRO role retained
Elsewhere in its report, the government dismisses MacAlister's recommendation to scrap the role of independent reviewing officers (IROs).
Jon Fayle, chair of the National Association of Independent Reviewing Officers, lobbied government to keep the role but accepts more needs to be done to quash criticism around its independence.
He says: “This often revolves around the role of independence and whether they can be genuinely independent and hold the local authority to account when they pay the IRO's salary.”
Fayle suggests that a pilot should be carried out giving responsibilities for IROs to a body such as the Office of the Children's Commissioner for England, Cafcass or a new standalone organisation.
Consultations on the proposals close in May with the government's response due to be published in September. Ministers propose introducing the new measures from April 2024 with pilots running for two years.
While measures included in the review have been hailed as a “step in the right direction” by sector leaders, concerns remain over the future of reforms at the end of the government's “test” period.
Russell says: “This requires political leadership and will to put the resources in place for the transformation we want to see.”
FOSTER CARE REFORMS
EXPERT PANEL REACTS TO PROPOSALS TO BOOST FOSTER CARER ALLOWANCES AND LAUNCH A NATIONAL RECRUITMENT DRIVE
Andy Elvin, chief executive, Tact Care
It is unclear how the uplift in national allowance will affect all foster carers because there are different levels of fees and all foster carers are being hit by the cost-of-living crisis. It's difficult to see, with the sums given, how it's going to reach all foster carers.
The money for recruitment of foster carers is brilliant, we do need a focus on this, but first we need to retain foster carers so we must improve remuneration to keep hold of the ones we’ve got, otherwise we’re just recruiting into a void.
Recruitment needs to be carried out at a local level because not a lot of local authorities are going to benefit from money being spent nationally on recruitment, they’re not set up to take enquiries so there would be a certain amount of wasted money. You have to set up a pipeline to receive enquiries and recruit foster carers before you spend money on an advertising board.
In terms of marketing, it's better done regionally, because for each local authority to add that layer of staff is expensive but if you had a group of 10 or 15 then having a small marketing and recruitment team is affordable.
Mark Owers, chair, National Adoption Recruitment Steering Group
I welcome the above-inflation rise for foster carers who for too long have been taken for granted by the government.
I also welcome investment in the recruitment and retention of foster carers. But the money must be used wisely; we won't get different results if we keep doing the same thing.
We need to re-work communications with foster carers, both in terms of message content and channels. We can't just keep putting posters on the back of buses.
We need to involve foster carers more in recruitment and support activities to enhance their commitment and positive engagement. Contact with someone who has received foster care or who has fostered has been shown to be positively associated with motivation for fostering. Peer support, underpinned by easy access to specialist support, is critical to the retention of carers.
We need to be more culturally aware and faith literate, operationally and strategically, to recruit a diverse range of foster carers. We need local, regional and national collaboration to co-ordinate messaging to maximise the impact of recruitment campaigns.
Harvey Gallagher, chief executive, Nationwide Association of Fostering Providers
We have campaigned for the government to make a pay award to foster carers so welcome new efforts to address this.
However, the raising of the national minimum allowance, while a positive step, will only benefit a small number of foster carers – most are already remunerated significantly above this low level.
A more impactful change would be for HM Revenue and Customs to positively consider “qualifying care relief”, the tax system for foster carers last reviewed in 2010. This would be a huge boost to foster carers – morally and financially. We are calling again for the government to make this happen.
Every local authority and independent fostering agency (IFA) is trying to recruit and retain foster carers. IFAs generally are more successful at this than local authorities. We would like to see an independent evaluation of these past efforts to inform future plans that includes local authorities and IFAs. We welcome the opportunity to co-design such projects in an environment in which we can learn from each other.
- Consultation from www.gov.uk/government/consultations/
Plan for revamp of early help
Pathfinder aims to get support to families earlier, but limited funding will restrict impact, say experts.
In response to Care Review chair Josh MacAlister's call for a “radical reset” to address a social care system “increasingly skewed to crisis intervention, with outcomes for children that continue to be unacceptably poor and costs that continue to rise”, the government's implementation strategy lays out plans for its £45m Families First for Children Pathfinder.
The pathfinder, which will be rolled out in 12 local authorities over the next few years, will test a new model of multi-disciplinary support for families facing challenges such as domestic abuse and poor mental health before they reach crisis point.
The services, which will include the creation of the new specialist child protection lead role, will work alongside child protection teams as well as health visitors, schools, adult mental health teams and family hubs.
While plans to offer support to families earlier is welcome, experts say there isn't enough funding in the plan to make it a reality beyond two years.
Steve Crocker, 2022/23 president of the Association of Directors of Children's Services, says: “The current financial context for local authorities is tough and so any additional investment to fund local pathfinders before wider rollout is welcome, however, the level of funding beyond the next two years remains unclear. Getting change right for children requires proper, equitable resourcing.”
Mark Russell, chief executive of The Children's Society, adds: “Bluntly, there is not enough money – £45m is not going to produce anywhere near the level of change that we need.”
Targeted help
Family help plans will also see the removal of a distinction between “targeted early help” and child in need when supporting families in a bid to ensure it is “something families actively seek out, rather than something to be feared or ashamed of”, according to the government's report.
However, Russell argues that removing the distinction will not help services to reach more families on the edge of care. A lower threshold is needed, he says.
“There are lots of families in crisis right now who, without support or help in relation to the poverty they’re living in, or the issues going on within their family, are going to end up putting more pressure on children's social care,” Russell adds.
National Children's Bureau chief executive Anna Feuchtwang echoes Russell's concerns. She calls for the government to introduce more immediate support for struggling families affected by the cost-of-living crisis.
“The cost-of-living crisis is pushing more families into hopeless situations, while inflation eats away at hard-pressed local authority budgets,” she says.
