System shift 1: Successfully supporting adults’ needs more often through aligned partnership resource and practice
System shift 3: Integrating schools in multi-agency partnerships that support families
Evidence driving this shift: Analysis of data about the needs of families of children who have entered care found that parental support needs relating to mental health, domestic abuse, or substance misuse were present in 81% of cases. Whilst these have been known in the children’s social care system as common adult support needs for some time, evidence gathered for this programme indicates that only half of parents with these needs accessed relevant specialist support before the child needed to be taken in to care (primarily as a result of their choice and willingness to engage in this support, as described in shift #2 below). This indicates an opportunity for the system to more successfully address these needs. What could be done differently: The established Family Safeguarding model is recognised good practice whereby practitioners specialising in adult mental reviewed the stories of 100+children who had been in care. They found that in 42% of cases, the biggest barrier to earlier, more effective support was successfully gaining parental consent and engagement. Analysis of data showed that children who grow up in more deprived neighbourhoods come in to care at 2.5 times the rate of children who grow up in less deprived neighbourhoods. In the cases analysed for this programme, less than a third of children’s journeys into care that practitioners reviewed had consistent engagement and inclusion of the voice of the child. In over 50% of journeys reviewed where practitioners felt the child’s wishes had been listened to and considered, practitioners also had a degree of confidence that the child could have been supported outside of care. This compared to just 22% of journeys where the voice of the child was not captured. What could be done differently: Ensure that all practitioners in the system likely to take on the role of Family Help Lead Practitioner are upskilled in the ability to form positive
health, domestic abuse, and substance misuse are embedded within children’s safeguarding teams. However, many local areas engaged in this work spoke of the difficulty in funding and sustaining this model. This leads to a possible conclusion that a more fundamental reshape of wider services to support adult needs is needed (across adult social care, public health commissioned and NHS services), enabled by joint commissioning of pooled budgets across partners. This should be done with an underpinning model of using child and adult level data to inform the prioritisation and targeting of support for adults integrated with wider children’s social care partners. At a system level, eligibility criteria across adult social care, NHS, and public health services should be reviewed to close gaps that currently leave many parents without the support they need. relationships with families that lead to trust and consent. Attention should be paid to agencies not previously experienced in taking on this role as part of a family receiving social care support. The success rate of gaining consent should be measured and reported as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) alongside others that are already established. Expand the use of Family Group Decision Making across the social care pathway, not just at the pre- proceedings stage, using data on individual family circumstances to prioritise where needed. Develop locality and neighbourhood models of delivery, including peripatetic Family Hub approaches in rural areas, to help practitioners build the trust and cultural understanding that makes gaining consent more likely. Finally, the importance of including the voice of children and young people within the consent process should not be overlooked. For older young people, their views should be taken into account alongside that of the views of the parents, even when those views are not aligned.
Evidence driving this shift: 56% of children who enter the care system each year are school age, and this cohort accounts for 77% of the direct costs of homes for children in care. Within this cohort, children entering the care system during primary school account for the largest number and cost. 80% of children who enter care at school age attend school three or more days per week (rising to 92% in primary age). This shows that schools are the public sector body most regularly interacting with children before coming into care and therefore have a key role in supporting the family. The work also found that one in three children in care have recorded special education needs, further highlighting their critical role in supporting children. What could be done differently: Use historic and live data to target school-facing resources proportionately to patterns of need, focusing effort on the schools and neighbourhoods with the highest concentration of at-risk children. Prioritise the system design work needed to integrate schools’ colleagues into multi-agency Family Help and Child Protection teams around individual children, ensuring that schools move from referrers into active, ongoing partners in the team around the family.
I think it would be good for schools to have vouchers like the council do when it comes to food banks… they could be the first point of contact before social workers are even involved.” Care experienced young person
System shift 2: Gaining the trust and consent of families to participate in early support more often Evidence driving this shift: Local practitioners
System shift 4: Targeted support from specialists in the local authority, at the right time, where it is needed, informed by joined up data across agencies
What could be done differently: Drawing on pre-existing information governance arrangements, develop improved data- sharing mechanisms and infrastructure across agencies to proactively identify families who could benefit from early specialist support, before a crisis point is reached. Analytical tools offer a practical means of focusing limited professional capacity on the right families, at the right time (such as the machine learning model piloted by one authority to identify children at risk of entering care not currently supported by the local authority). These tools should support, not replace, practitioner judgment, and require careful ethical and governance frameworks.
Evidence driving this shift: 39% of children enter the care system without receiving support from a local authority safeguarding specialist (through an Early Help, Child in Need, or Child Protection Plan) in the six months before they enter care. 35% of children enter the care system having only been in receipt of a Child Protection Plan before entering care. Building on shifts one to three, this demonstrates the opportunity to connect these families to specialist local authority resource earlier. The second most common enabler to early support identified by practitioners when analysing over 100 stories of children who had been in care, was information-sharing across agencies and other local authorities, which would offer an opportunity to connect local authority specialists to families earlier.
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