A report by the charity found that children’s social services are struggling to cope as the number of children identified as being at risk of neglect or abuse rises, and families continue to struggle financially.
The authors said increased demand, combined with reducing budgets, has meant local authorities are raising the threshold at which they intervene to protect children, resulting in more children being left without support.
The report, How Safe Are Our Children? 2014, states that while the increase in reporting of abuse is welcome, child protection systems are “buckling under pressure”.
It points to the fact that early intervention projects, designed to prevent children requiring crisis point help, have been cut back in order to free up funding for more services providing immediate support.
Peter Wanless, chief executive of the NSPCC, said children’s services departments have very little option but to raise the threshold of when they act.
“This is leaving large numbers of children with no statutory support,” he said.
“Acting alone, children’s social services struggle to be more than an emergency service, getting involved when pain and suffering for children is already entrenched or risk is very high.
Wanless said that while the NSPCC would support greater investment in direct support for children, the organisation understands the difficulties posed by the financial pressures.
"Society must stop seeing child protection as simply the responsibility of children’s social workers," he added.
Instead teachers, nursery workers, police, doctors, nurses and all professionals who come into contact with children should be empowered to play their part and deliver “small and simple interventions” early on in order to stop abuse and neglect for a fraction of the cost of trying to tackle it later down the line.
“Successive governments have talked the talk on ‘early intervention’ and joined up services, but have failed to deliver lasting change,” he said.
“Early help is a patchwork of different services and people, with it too often being a matter of chance if abuse or neglect is prevented or detected early.”
Alan Wood, vice president of the Association of Directors of Children's Services, said that although children’s services have had their budgets cut by more than 26 per cent since 2010, it is not correct to say that children’s social care is effectively an emergency service.
But he said it is true that services “do not look the same as they did in the days of plenty”.
“It is simply not possible to provide the same services with less and less money; broad swathes of early help, youth and family services are being delivered in a different way so that children and their families get the best possible support despite the financial limitations faced by local authorities,” he said.
“In truth, the challenges facing children’s social care will not diminish any time in the near future.
“What we need is a realistic national debate about how services will cope with the increased level of need we are seeing, and how every agency can play an increased pro-active role to ensure that problems are tackled head-on before they become more acute.”
Sue Kent, professional officer at the British Association of Social Workers, said social work is about working with people to find solutions to their problems in order to prevent families reaching crisis point.
“We need to think hard about a return to community-based social work that supports parents where necessary and uses available resources to prevent crisis, not be forced to intervene once a child’s situation has escalated to a point of no return,” she added.
