Collaboration, creativity and more cuts: 2016 in children's services

The second half of 2015 saw the government set out its policy priorities for the coming year and the funding that will be available to deliver them. Here, a group of experts outline what the year ahead has in store for children’s services.

Erosion of councils’ education role creates a vacuum
By John Fowler, policy manager, Local Government Information Unit

In December, schools minister Lord Nash outlined the government’s vision for the future role of local authorities in education services. Looking forward to a time when “local authorities would not be running schools”, he said local authorities will still be responsible for a range of functions including sufficiency of school places, pupil admissions, special educational needs (SEN) and disability, and child safeguarding.

For leaders and managers of education and children’s services, 2016 will be the year when they have to tackle the implications of what the minister is saying. There will be a white paper in the early summer outlining at last what the government’s plans are, with a bill in the next session of parliament.

It is expected to take 10 years to remove local authorities from running schools, by which time the government will have built up sufficient multi-academy trusts, and the capacity of the regional schools commissioners, to take on the tasks currently performed by local government.

The first problem that will arise is how to run down a service over 10 years while keeping sufficient able and competent staff in post. Why would an ambitious local government officer spend time running down services when the future is elsewhere?

The second problem is how to keep an educational influence on the remaining local authority children’s services. Without doubt a range of children’s services have benefited over the past 50 years as education has become a right for all young people. Without an understanding of education, will early years provision return to the day nursery culture? Will children’s centres become targeted social care intervention centres? Will “education” be removed from SEN provision? Will school place planning be limited to getting enough schools rather than creating an efficient and effective schools system? The third problem is how to do this during a period of even greater reductions on local government expenditure.

In the year ahead, we will see how local government participates in this debate – will its leaders raise a white flag or come out fighting?


Funding cuts will threaten support for vulnerable families
By Anna Feuchtwang, chief executive, National Children’s Bureau

Research we carried out last year on levels of funding for early help services found that while central government allocations have shrunk dramatically over the past five years, local authorities were finding ways to protect families from the full effect – cutting back levels of spending by a smaller proportion than reductions in the funding they received.

This year, as cuts go even deeper, that leeway in council budgets is likely to have evaporated, and children, young people and their families will increasingly have to make do without council support. With, on average, a quarter of their budget taken away in the Spending Review, councils will have to focus increasingly on helping those in crisis, rather than preventing problems arising in the first place.

Services for looked-after children look to be in particular jeopardy. There are increasing numbers of children entering the care system, particularly among infants in the first months of their lives. Without well-resourced social care teams to support these children and the carers they rely on, there won’t be much opportunity for improving outcomes.

Similarly in childcare, scarce funds may undermine the intentions of policymakers to extend access through the expansion of free childcare, which will begin being piloted in September. Only when early education is of a high quality does it significantly improve children’s life chances. Yet 15 per cent of children attend settings that have not been judged “good” or “outstanding”, with those in the most disadvantaged areas least likely to have access to the best providers. In addition, half of parents of disabled children say their childcare provider cannot cater for their child’s additional needs. To put these shortcomings right requires a fairer funding formula for early education, and a clear plan for improving the skills of the early years workforce.

Local authorities now have powers to raise funds for adult social care services, rather than those for children and young people, leaving many wondering what happened to government rhetoric that “early intervention is key”. Add to this the pressure of knowing that failing children’s services could be handed to outside bodies to run them, it is clear that many town halls will find 2016 a tough year.

But there is cause for optimism: the commitment signalled by the Prime Minister at the end of 2015 to improve children’s services has promise. By developing a What Works Centre to improve practice, we should ensure all those working to improve the lives of children design their services based on tried-and-tested approaches.


Inter-authority collaboration key to doing more with less
By John Freeman, independent consultant and former director of children’s services

The year ahead will be like many others to come in the future: really tough. Funding is going to be squeezed, with the threats of take-over when things go wrong sharper and more urgent. All parts of the public sector will feel the pain – local authorities, health, police, youth justice, the Department for Education itself, and its agencies, including Ofsted.

The DfE talks blithely of savings to be made in administration – but the “back office billions” are largely illusory, because they have already been saved, with budgets cut to the bone. If anything, the ending of local authority management of schools dating from 1988 has worsened efficiency. For example, local authorities used to buy millions of exercise books for their schools, negotiating huge discounts that are just not there for individual schools.

The danger is that we just sleep-walk into the future, doing what we did before, but less every year, salami-slicing budgets, reducing non-statutory services, raising thresholds, shunting costs to anyone that can be persuaded to pay. That would mean spending more of diminishing budgets on crisis management, and less on prevention. If we don’t continue to work with disadvantaged families in children’s centres, their children will do worse at school, they won’t be able to get a decent job, and will end up over-represented in unemployment and, worse, prison – at huge long-term social and financial cost.

There is no magic bullet, but we should all think of things that we could do better together. The Tri-borough in west London is the best-known example, and inter-local authority collaboration and shared services have a positive future. I have always been a great believer in local democratic decision-making, and that must continue, building a strong link between local people and the services provided. But much of what local authorities, schools and hospitals do is very similar, and the differences really are not significant. So, perhaps the various “powerhouses” should be incentivised to bring local services closer, to work together to make savings – doing things once.


Early help must not be sacrificed as spending is reduced
By Donna Molloy, director of implementation, the Early Intervention Foundation

Although individual local authorities’ financial settlements are yet to be finalised (the proposed budgets have just been announced), it seems inevitable that further spending cuts will impact on early intervention services.

While there have been reductions in early help services in some local areas in recent years, in others these pressures have reinforced commitment to preventative work as children’s services have sought to pool resources with partners such as schools, health and police.

One positive effect of diminishing resources is the strengthened case for integrating public services. There is growing consensus as to the need to collaborate and remodel services around a preventative focus to reduce demand on intensive or acute services. In our work in local areas, we are seeing new models of services emerging, which bring together children’s services with reshaped neighbourhood police teams and community-based maternity and health services all based on shifting focus from reacting to preventing, supporting families and tackling health inequalities. This has the potential to keep people out of children’s social care, specialist health services or the criminal justice system.

The potential for devolution agreements to support integrated public services is also likely to feature on the 2016 horizon. This is only just starting to be explored as illustrated in the recent North East deal, which established a new service transformation fund to support integration of local public services to deliver early intervention to support individuals and families with complex needs.

Developing evidence as to the types of integrated models and workforce practices likely to be most effective, is crucial to guide local service development. The first practitioner who spots problems needs to be able to build relationships and have the “early intervention toolkit” they need. Yet we still know relatively little about what makes a good early intervention practitioner in contrast to fields like social work or teaching where more is known.

The emphasis on transforming mainstream services in the expanded Troubled Families programme will increase the focus on developing capacity and ability across wider services to work proactively with families early on. It is important that government investment in the What Works Centre does not neglect preventative work with children and families. As state-funded services retract, investing in practices and approaches that have been shown to make a difference has never been more important.  


Better resettlement of offenders crucial to youth justice review
By Sally Benton, head of policy, Nacro

2016 has the potential to be a momentous year, but with change there are always risks. Education funding will be well profiled, probably in the usual way: middle England verses urban hubs. Yet, outside media debate, decisions must place young people at the centre. Funding has to work for all young people, those with obvious talents and academic prowess and those more hidden, disengaged and forgotten.

Charlie Taylor’s review of the youth justice system is welcome. The system is set up for a time when juveniles in trouble were locked up in our society. Thankfully, times have changed. But the youth justice system has to respond to more complex problems today: gang-related violence, mental ill health and the seemingly entrenched over-representation of looked-after children and young black men in custody. A new system must incorporate compelling evidence of what works, focus on resettlement and empower staff and young people to move forward and address complex problems in a targeted way.

We will also see the rollout of child and adolescent mental health transformation plans. These plans will translate to the local level many of the policy pledges contained in the Future in Mind strategy. Getting this right will be critical if we are going to see tangible transformation of mental health services for young people. The voluntary and community sector would like to see new money channelled into more creative solutions that include a better focus on preventing and intervening early when mental health problems arise.


Youth services must show evidence of positive impact in order to survive
By Michael Bracey, corporate director – people, Milton Keynes Council

Over the past few years, virtually every area of the country has seen youth services restructured and, in many cases, funding reduced. The way this has happened, with hundreds of councils making their own decisions about what to fund, has meant youth workers are now doing very different things depending on local priorities.

The year ahead for these reformed services will be one where commissioners are increasingly looking for evidence of impact and value for money.

Good youth workers have always been able to do this. They manage to strike the right balance between creativity, innovation and securing improved outcomes, and have many passionate supporters in the community who understand the value of what they are doing.  

But not all youth workers are good – and this is the real challenge as we go into 2016. If youth work is to arrest its decline, the focus needs to shift from structural change to improving quality. For youth workers and their managers, this means taking direct action to tackle poor performance. Those colleagues who are not up to it or do not think they’re accountable to anyone other than the young people they work with, need to change quickly or be moved on.

And from government, we should ask for investment in workforce development – cash-strapped local authorities will struggle to find the money to spend on training the next generation of youth workers.

In the face of increasing demand and reducing resources, children’s services need to find new ways of reducing the need for high-end, specialist services through more effective personal and social development programmes.

We also need to deliver on our commitment to develop more child-centred services where children and young people’s voices are heard more clearly.

Local and national government, our delivery partners, youth workers and, of course, young people need to work together to make the year ahead a turning point that sees youth work re-established as a highly valued, high-quality and powerful part of children’s services.


Youth work needs a genuine champion to arrest its decline
By David Wright, youth work consultant

Youth work in 2016 will, unfortunately, see more of the same: more cuts, further calls for it to show evidence of its impact, exhortations for youth service leaders to be more innovative and all the while the decline won’t be arrested.

Children’s services over the next few years will see increasing demand, more inadequate inspections, cuts and intervention. Against that background, youth work will continue to get its sympathetic hearing as a means of early intervention, while at the same time being required to make double-digit percentage cuts. As a consequence, youth work will be further reduced.

Youth workers who are now dispersed, working as part of early intervention teams or as family support workers, do so without the professional framework they once had through the local authority structure; something their social work colleagues, and others, continue to enjoy.

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