Policy Library

By Cristina Odone, Head of Family, Centre for Social Justice

Earlier this year, Josh MacAlister unveiled his Independent Review of Children’s Social Care calling on government to upend the current system and to invest more than £2.5bn in a new model.

To understand the failure of children’s social care, one need only read the recent UCL longitudinal study of adult care leavers. They died earlier, struggled with more mental health issues, and were more likely to be homeless, poor and in trouble with the law than their peers who had not been in the charge of the state. And this was true even of those who had come even briefly in contact with the care system.

The tragic deaths of Baby Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson which prompted a review of child protection measures, had served only to reinforce the message: time to overhaul the system.

The Centre for Social Justice(CSJ), in collaboration with the Hadley Trust, has invested the five months since the Review’s publication in finding the best ways to support MacAlister’s drive for change and help implement his Review. In particular, we have studied how best to embed its core feature, the Family Help Teams, in our national life.

The title itself suggests a welcome shift in perspective: the services are dealing with families, not just individuals. This marks a change in the social worker’s protocol, which currently allows professionals to consider every child in isolation, rather than linked to a host of connections – from parents through extended family to neighbours and school. When 90% of children in care are there because of their parents’ needs rather than their own, this approach is plain wrong.

Local authorities/(LA’s) would oversee the establishment of their local Family Help Team, while government would set objectives and models of delivery as part of a National Children’s Social Care Framework.

In making up his teams, MacAlister relies on social workers as the pillars of his Family Help Teams. And yet,  extensive evidence gathering from our alliance of charities showed significant problems in the relationship between parents and social workers, with widely reported negative perceptions of service provision among families.

A Family Help Team built on social workers cannot hope to engage the most vulnerable families. The CSJ therefore suggests that in forming their local Teams, LAs include representatives of local charities and grassroot groups, a Health Visitor and a “parent champion”. These figures are part of local residents’ everyday life and will know where to find the hard to reach families, what they need most, and where to find the best support in the community.

National and local government can make it easier for smaller, local charities to play a bigger role in supporting the most vulnerable families. Often, small charities lack the capacity of larger organisations to tender applications with elaborate prospectuses, but have remarkable abilities to adapt, sustain long-term relationships, and understand – and thereby build trust with – those in their communities. Government should demand that councils invite local charities to bid for delivering services to their local community.

Local businesses, too, have a role in this new model. Employers can train, employ, or offer an apprenticeship to young people and to the parent member (“Parent Champion”) of a Family Help Team, providing an opportunity for skills training and development as well as raising aspirations and boosting confidence.

Finally, data sharing between partners with mandatory responsibility for safeguarding has proved often to be patchy and challenging. The new Multi-Agency Safeguarding Tracker (MAST) being piloted in the West Midlands is underpinned by a documented data governance structure to allow partner organisations to share the minimum amount of demographic data to assist safeguarding professionals. Legal frameworks are used and identified from the outset, without which the data sharing would not be possible. To comply with GDPR, partners only share the minimum amount of data necessary to improve information to assist safeguarding decision-making.

MAST is scalable in terms of wider geographical coverage but also in bringing in other datasets and safeguarding partners to further enrich the insights that professionals will be able to take from their searches.

Josh MacAlister has dragged an orphan issue centre stage. His review of the children’s care system is commendable for articulating a vision of social justice, in which every child, whether raised by their family or by the state, may live happily and healthily. The CSJ together with the Hadley Trust hope that our contribution to this mission allows MacAlister – and government – to realise it.