Supporting enablers to help achieve these system shifts Engagement with stakeholders across the system identified several key enablers which, if implemented, will help maximise the outcomes that can be achieved through the system shifts. Local level enablers: 1. Commitment across local leaders, including local councillors, to prioritise outcomes for children at risk of entering care or in the care system. 2. Development of local financial mechanisms and incentives to promote proactive, early support to families of children at risk of entering care or in the care system. 3. Use of data to inform targeted support to families and prioritised service design, enabled by appropriate information governance arrangements, to support practitioners’ judgement and decision-making. 4. Continuous improvement of the system’s ability to successfully engage families and gain consent for support. 5. Family Group Decision Making used as a practical means of facilitating the wider family network to support a family, potentially as an enabler of successfully gaining consent. 6. Joined-up local commissioning of services (across adult social care, public health and the NHS) to support adults and help ensure that parents of children at risk of entering care or in the care system can receive support for their needs. 7. Promoting positive exit from the care system as a priority partnership outcome. 8. Integrating foster carers into teams around the families of children in care. 9. Planning for continuity of local partnership improvement and transformation through Local Government Reorganisation. 10. Meaningfully engaging children, young people, and families in service design and strategic decision-making.
System shift 5: Supporting an ongoing connection between families more often and more successfully, across foster carers and partners Evidence driving this shift: Over 80% of
National level enablers: 1. Commitment to prioritising outcomes for families where children are most at risk across all government reform and policy development. 2. Protecting funding for preventative services, through support to manage overspend on children in care budgets and dedicated funding. 3. Extending the Children’s Social Care Prevention Grant (now part of the Children, Families, and Youth Grant) beyond its current end date of 2028/29 to at least 2032/33. 4. Investment in a national data infrastructure to enable joined-up intelligence about families’ needs. 5. Development of a national framework for the ethical use of data and Artificial Intelligence to identify families that may benefit from proactive support, with a clear boundary beyond which human judgement and consent should be utilised, to accelerate the benefits of this technology at local levels in a responsible way. 6. Adding working with families to gain consent for support to statutory safeguarding training requirements for all roles within the children’s services system. 7. Aligning statutory thresholds for adult support services across adult social care and NHS services to ensure parents of vulnerable children receive the support they need (which would require legislative change and updates to statutory guidance). 8. Ensuring that Regional Care Co-operatives are developed in a way that incentivises and enables providers of homes for children in care – particularly foster carers – to actively support children in care to return to their family where appropriate (as part of the team around a child in care and their family). Across all of the shifts identified, it is clear that if the benefits from the preventative approaches outlined in this report are to be maximised, a cultural shift will be required for all partners in the system. This cultural shift centres on how risk is balanced, potentially moving away from short-term interventions to contain immediate risk that can inadvertently impact on longer-term outcomes.
What could be done differently: Use data to identify children in care for whom return to their family network (including siblings, wider family members and friends) is most likely, and ensure available capacity is focused on those children. Foster carers should be integrated into the wider multi-agency team around the child and family, rather than operating in isolation from it. Partnerships should strongly promote a leadership-endorsed, system- wide culture of championing positive exit from care as a priority outcome. This outcome should be tracked and reported alongside other KPIs with a view to ensuring the need for crisis response work does not ‘crowd out’ reconnection work. They asked me once [about whether I wanted to return home] and then never asked me again… In hindsight I wasn’t supported to understand the decision, and I wish I’d made a different one…
children stay in care for more than a year, and approximately half of those who enter above the age of five remain until they turn 18. For children who stay in care for more than one year, 80% were initially placed in fostering. 28% of these children had an initial permanence plan of returning to their family showing the potential to pursue this outcome for more children. Case reviews identified that those themes contained in shifts one to four would best enable this – particularly support aligned to parental need and consent to receive that support. However, senior leaders engaged in this work consistently articulated the challenge of capacity to support this work alongside dealing with crises such as other children needing to come in to care or existing placements breaking down.
I felt like an inconvenience.” Care experienced young person
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