Social workers to be given direct spending powers to support families
Joe Lepper
Friday, January 25, 2019
Social workers are to be handed devolved budgets to directly support families and be located in schools, as part of two pilot schemes aimed at reducing the need for children to be taken into care.
The What Works Centre for Children's Social Care is to work with six councils across two ‘change projects' until March 2020 to test out new ways of reducing the children in care population.
A total of £2.4m has been set aside for the work, with each council receiving between £400,000 and £600,000.
The first project will see social workers in Darlington, Hillingdon and Wigan given greater control over how money is spent on supporting families where there is a risk of a child being taken into care.
In Wigan a group of child protection social workers will be given a devolved budget to spend on support for families at their discretion and in Darlington social workers will allocate devolved budgets to 30 families.
Meanwhile, in Hillingdon one of the council's child protection teams is to focus on working with 100 young people at risk of sexual exploitation to help them devise their own support plans and chair their own meetings.
The second project sees social workers in Lambeth, Southampton and Stockport be located in schools to work directly with families and children as well as support teachers through training and consultations.
In Southampton three clusters of schools with high levels of social care referrals will be targeted, while in Stockport social workers will work directly with eight primary schools and two secondary schools.
Lambeth's pilot will see social workers focus on contextual safeguarding, which looks at wider risks of harm to young people outside of their family, in schools, online and their local community.
"There has been an unprecedented increase in the number of children in care in recent years and we owe it to all families to offer the best possible opportunity to avoid the need for care," said What Works Centre for Children's Social Care chair Alan Wood.
"With these two projects, we want to test the hypotheses that if you empower social workers to take decisions about providing support to families or in utilising (or not) statutory procedures without the need for further referral, then more timely decisions can be made, enabling earlier interventions to help children remain safely at home.'
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A third of councils with a social care function applied to be part of the pilots, which will be evaluated by Cardiff University's Children's Social Care Research and Development Centre (CASCADE).
Jenny Bullen, Wigan Council's cabinet member for children and young people added: "Having budget-holding social workers who can quickly purchase resources and services for families is a new and exciting way of working.
"We hope that it will make a huge difference in the success of our plans to help more children remain safely at home with their families when they need it most. We are also looking forward to sharing our learning with others."
Plans for social workers to test devolved budgets were first announced by the What Works Centre last October.
According to this month's National Audit Office review into children's social care spending the number of children taken into care across England has risen by 15 per cent since 2010 and in 2017/18 the national overspend by councils on children's social care was £872m.