In an letter to Education Secretary, Gillian Keegan, shared with CYP Now, the councillors said that in the last few months, social workers and commissioners across all local authorities in the South East have experienced a “considerable increase” in the difficulty of sourcing "appropriate, affordable" placements for children in care.
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Placements often come at a high cost and the limited, expensive options are leading some councils to use unregulated supported accommodation, the councillors say.
“Many of our council budgets are stretched beyond what we can afford. The costs of placing children are now making it impossible to fund according to need, and have gone beyond unsustainable for our budgets at a time of ever-increasing costs,” the letter states.
The councillors are part ofcommissioning consortium the South East Sector Led Improvement Programme (SESLIP), which aims to improve children’s services through collaboration between councils and service providers in South East England.
Since 2020, SESLIP has been involved in talks with providers of residential and foster care services nationally about how the sector might innovate to provide the right kind of local care in the future.
They believe that using in-house foster carers not only provides the best level of safe support for carers and placed children and young people, but it is also the most cost-effective option.
“Many of us are focussed on increasing our number of in-house carers, looking at providing local alternatives to out-of-area residential placements and [we] continue to increase the number of children and young people placed with in-house carers if we can,” councillors said.
Citing the government-commissioned review into the social care market from the Competitions and Markets’ Authority, which highlights a lack of placements “of the right kind, in the right place” and with the level of profit being made from providers higher than they would expect “if this market were functioning effectively”, the councillors said that the report paints a picture “that we all recognise”.
They add: “The pressure that this has placed our children’s social workers under has seen many leaving the profession and our remaining teams are struggling to manage their increasing workloads.”
The coalition urges the Department for Education to take “urgent action” to support councils.
“The market needs to be developed nationally to ensure sufficiency and that can only be driven, or at least influenced, by government. Ultimately, we all want what is best for our children in care and ensuring we can provide them the very best level of care and support is something we believe to be a shared goal of councils and government," the letter states.
Meanwhile, Ofsted’s latest fostering statistics have revealed that foster carer shortages are getting worse, with one in eight fostering households having left, and more leaving than joining, over the past year.
