'No quick fixes for children's social care', warn experts

Speaking at an All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Children meeting this week, the group of experts said many of the challenges faced by children’s social care services – such as rising care applications – are long-term and will not be solved quickly.

It will also take at least five years before the benefits of the Department for Education’s Children’s Social Care Innovation Programme are fully realised, they added. However, this is at odds with the short-term nature of planning and decision making in local government.

Giving evidence to the APPG’s inquiry on children’s social care, Anthony Douglas, chief executive of Cafcass (the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service), said local authorities and government must focus on “systematic marginal gains over time” instead of “quick fixes”.

“There is a danger when you’re in a panic to turn to a sort of frenzy and to talk about transformation as something radical that is going to be different – if somewhere is struggling year after year you know that it just isn’t going to happen,” he said.

“There is a job for all of us to try to persuade government and local authority lead members to understand that – as with Cafcass, which took seven to 10 years to change – it doesn’t take six months.”

Lisa Holmes, director for the Centre for Child and Family Research at Loughborough University, which is analysing the impact that two-year innovation funding has had on councils that received it in 2014, said it will be years before it is known whether the innovation programme has been successful.

“Where we have a real issue in terms of the implementation is the time it takes – we have to allow two to three years for set up and we have to acknowledge that with any innovation we’re looking at more than five years before [it] can be implemented,” she said.

“That’s working in complete conflict with authorities that are having to make decisions about what they invest in within the next year – there’s a real mismatch between the evidence and timeframes and decisions that are having to be made.

“We have to acknowledge the innovation programme funding is short term. The evaluation has had less than a year to evidence whether these innovations are successful or not – it’s not long enough.”

Ashley McDougall, director of local service delivery at the National Audit Office, also recognised concerns over the amount of time needed to properly assess the impact of innovation fund projects, and said it is important that evidence from the programme improves the whole system.

“What we’re getting is a system that is failing too many children and is not as good as it should be – it’s across the board,” he said.

“I think that’s why we need to get at what works. You can’t do that by getting leaders or exemplars – you need to have supportive research.”