Residential Care Leadership Board ‘disbanded without notifying sector’

The Residential Care Leadership Board (RCLB), which was set up in 2017 to lead on the delivery of the changes to residential children's care in England that were recommended in Sir Martin Narey's 2016 review of the sector, has been scrapped to make way for a controversial working group to draft national standards for unregulated supported accommodation

Announcing its creation, the Department for Education said its aims included encouraging local authorities to reduce the cost of children's home placements by working together on commissioning, and ensuring that best practice in residential childcare is shared and put into practice.

• Analysis: Put end to unregulated provision for under-18s, urge campaigners

• Analysis: Unregulated supported accommodation - what you need to know as consultation closes

The board also oversaw the launch of the Staying Close pilot scheme that allowed young people leaving residential care to keep in touch with their support network.

However, chair of the board Sir Alan Wood, former president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) told CYP Now that the board had disbanded on 1 April.

The confirmation came after sector leaders received an automatic email reply from the DfE which reads: “The Residential Care Leadership Board was disbanded on 1 April 2020” and asks respondents to contact the DfE directly.

Wood said that the National Stability Forum – a national body to oversee the entire children's social care system – agreed following a report submitted by the board in January that it had met its objectives and could be wound down.

Wood added that the board’s proposal to continue work on unregulated supported accommodation led to the creation of a controversial working group tasked with drafting national standards for such provision during a public consultation on the issue.

Wood said that proposals put forward by the board to continue its work “in particular with regard to work on unregistered and unregulated homes, establishment of a task group to explore key issues from research on unregulated provision, and work on the creation of national standards would be led directly by the relevant policy teams at the DfE”.

The RCLB recommended the creation of the working group, which is also chaired by Wood, he said. 

The creation of the group, which included representatives from organisations including Ofsted and the Local Government Association, split opinions across the sector when its existence was revealed by CYP Now in March.

Wood said at the time that the “purpose of the group is to discuss key questions and field problems that may arise once the consultation has finished”.

It was set to meet a handful of times to discuss national standards, but meetings were disrupted during lockdown forcing it to reconvene in June.

However, sector leaders claimed work to draft national standards for unregulated supported accommodation “undermined” the consultation which ran from 11 February to 8 April. 

Jonathan Stanley, chief executive of the National Centre for Excellence in Residential Child Care, branded the closure of the board “a continuation of decisions made about the sector without consulting the sector”.

It gives the message that “residential children’s care is not respected as a positive equal option for young people”, he added, saying that the sector received “no final report and no independent evaluation” of its work despite its closure.

“The commissioning projects have not delivered the additional capacity or efficient, effective brokerage or budgets. They were more of the same rather than any innovation.

“What the sector needs is an experienced knowledgeable task force rather than administration by DfE. We need structure and strategy," Stanley said, calling for answers over future policy regarding residential children’s care.

Peter Sandiford, chief executive of the Independent Children’s Home Association, called for the leadership of the residential sector to be a focus of the upcoming care review. 

"I think it is important that the residential children's sector has extensive leadership from the centre," he said, "I believe the care review should focus on this."

The DfE has been contacted for comment.