02: Introduction
Context Helping children and young people to achieve the best outcomes in life is the goal of everyone involved in supporting families. A complex, multi-agency ‘ecosystem’ across education, health care providers, local authorities, the voluntary sector, and other partners supports children and families to achieve a wide range of different outcomes. Many elements of this ecosystem are undergoing a process of national reform with the aim of improving multiple outcomes for children and families, and potentially helping to reduce the number of children needing to be taken into care. These reforms include but are not limited to: 1. The Families First Partnership Programme (linked to further reforms in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act). 2. The Best Start in Life Programme. 3. The Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) reforms published in the 2026 schools’ white paper Every child achieving and thriving . 4. Reforms to education laid out in the 2026 schools’ white paper Every child achieving and thriving . 5. Local Government Reorganisation (LGR). 6. The policy direction towards integrated neighbourhood working across health and care services. A particular focus of these reforms is on services becoming more preventative, including: • Primary prevention: ensuring additional needs never arise. • Secondary prevention: ensuring that additional needs are quickly met at the earliest point before further escalation. • Tertiary prevention: ensuring that additional needs are de-escalated as quickly and effectively as possible after a crisis.
These reforms are taking place in the context of LGR which will fundamentally change the structure and delivery of children’s social care within the areas involved in reorganisation, and which will have a major impact on their available capacity. As such, LGR presents both a structural opportunity to redesign children’s services partnerships, and a transitional risk to the continuity of the preventative work described in this report. This context raises an important question: how can the various opportunities presented be maximised, and the challenges overcome, to best support children and young people at risk of entering the care system, by creating a system even more anchored in prevention and reconnection? To successfully join up the delivery of these multiple reforms at a local level, and to maximise the opportunity to deliver improved services for families, the system needs to navigate challenges in the detail of day-to-day service delivery, which will not be defined at a policy or reform level. These challenges span increasing need; constrained finances and resources; system-wide practice; operations; workforce; digital systems and more. This will be essential to make sure that the multiple policy initiatives deliver what they are designed to achieve: better outcomes for children, young people, and families as an enabler of a more financially sustainable system. Although the various reforms provide a new impetus and focus, striving to continuously improve services for children, young people and families has always been a core ethos of local and national children’s service systems. While there has been continuous complexity in achieving this, recent factors have created new and additional challenges, including the legacy from the pandemic; the emergence of online risk factors; the impact of local government reorganisation; and the cost of living crisis.
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