03: System shifts to help prevent children and young people from coming into care or remaining in care
From these findings, and supported by the programme’s wider analysis and engagement, five key priorities for improvement have emerged. This section outlines the evidence identified through this programme, and the recommended ‘system shifts’ emerging from this analysis. The priorities identified in this section describe opportunities to improve support for families before and during their involvement with the statutory children’s social care system. They should not be read as suggesting that entry to care is a system failure, or that the children whose cases were reviewed were let down by practitioners. Entry to care is typically a last resort, reached after sustained professional assessment, legal scrutiny, and a considered judgment that a child’s welfare requires it. The opportunities identified here are in the context of a complex system, and in all cases, the child’s safety and best interests remain the overriding consideration. The analysis in this section draws primarily on data analysis and case reviews. It necessarily looks backwards, reviewing what happened, what support was in place, and what contacts occurred. However, it cannot fully capture what practitioners knew at the time, the quality of relationships they had built with families, the risks they were actively holding, or the professional judgments they were making in real time – the purpose of the case reviews was purely to consider what could have been different on a child’s journey into care, with the benefit of hindsight. Practitioners working with families at risk of care are routinely managing significant uncertainty, chronic and cumulative harm, and situations where the right course of action is genuinely unclear. The following shifts are suggested in that context. Finally, it should be noted that the shifts proposed will not necessarily make a difference to every single child at risk of entering care. The evidence has been deliberately analysed to identify the system shifts that should make the biggest possible impact to highest proportion of children and their families.
Through this programme, over 100 stories of children were analysed by local practitioners to identify whether those children and their families would have ideally received different support in the time before the child entered care or in the time since entering care. They waited until it really, really got bad before taking action. Things could have been prevented if they’d taken it seriously earlier.” Care experienced young person Practitioners found that: • For 70% of children, their families could have been supported in an improved way, by at least one element of the multi-agency children’s support system, before the child entered care. This does not mean that the decision to take these children into care was the wrong one at the point in time where that happened, but does suggest opportunities where earlier or more coordinated support may have been possible. • For 47% of those children, there was a degree of confidence amongst practitioners that if the family had received that alternative support, the child would have likely not needed to be taken in to care. • For 32% of children, the families of these children could have been supported in an improved way by the complex multi-agency system, after the child entered care. • For 33% of those children, there was a degree of confidence amongst practitioners that if the family had received that alternative support, the child could have positively exited the care system. These findings will inevitably include a degree of ‘hindsight bias’, nonetheless they clearly indicate a significant potential for improving outcomes for children and their families. They are useful in illustrating the scale of what could be achieved; however, the impact that could realistically be delivered is likely to be somewhat lower. To reflect this, conservative assumptions have been applied to scale down these figures in the modelling of potential impacts on numbers of children in care and local authority finances later in the report.
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