The two pathfinders announced are to be local authority-led but are not yet active. There is no evidence that councils can work together to deliver children’s social care. In fact, regional adoption agencies have demonstrated just how dysfunctional such an approach can be.
I proposed a national care service to the Care Review and continue to believe that this is the best way forward. If we created 15 RCCs across England answering to the DfE as an arms-length body then this could be transformative. Sitting above the RCCs could be a flat management structure with five executive directors who would oversee and support three RCCs each, a chief executive, chief financial officer and a marketing and recruitment director.
I urge the minister to consider piloting an RCC that is not local authority-led and answers to the DfE. Ultimately they could be part of a National Care Service as a non-ministerial department within the government, as Ofsted is. Such a service could be responsible for foster care, adoption, kinship care, residential care, unregulated care and the secure youth estate. With high-quality care and good outcomes for children being its core objectives and having the requisite size to sensibly manage the provision and sufficiency of care, such a structural change could positively transform the care system.
The RCCs could cover foster, kinship and adoptive care plus residential and secure settings and families where children return home to care from birth parents – a practice blind spot at present as these parents are often poorly supported. They will also commission Pause or similar services to ensure women who have children removed do not go on to have more children removed.
They will be of sufficient size to ensure sufficiency of all types of care. Each RCC will have its own recruitment team who would assess foster carers, adopters and kinship carers and recruit residential and secure home staff.
However, the delivery will be local, as each one will include foster, kinship and adoptive families, families where children have returned home to their parents and in some places a children’s home. This local support approach will be crucial – local social workers and other professionals can support all family types, training groups can be mixed and involve parents of all types as well as residential staff – as they are all bringing up the same children and can, collectively, be the village that it takes.
Such an approach can involve local schools, health services and charities. Budgets and decision-making authority must be devolved to families and the local professionals supporting them. In this way those that know the children and young people best, and those children and young people themselves, can make the decisions that will impact their lives.
We need a radical reset as we currently fail too many children, and we need a service structure that is dedicated to children in all types of care and is not distracted by also being responsible for child protection services.
It is now 35 years since the 1989 Children Act: it’s high time we lived up to its central tenant that “the welfare of the child is paramount” and designed a service around children rather than expecting children to fit into a dysfunctional system.
The DfE has recently announced that the two RCC pilots will be run by groups of councils. Independent fostering agencies (IFAs) routinely achieve higher Ofsted ratings than council fostering services despite IFAs undergoing a more rigorous inspection regime. It is disappointing that the children’s minister Janet Daby and the DfE are ignoring this expertise when piloting RCCs. Not having diverse RCC pilots is a missed opportunity and smacks of rearranging deckchairs when what is required is a new ship.
