This is set against 16% of all contacts for local authority children’s social care support coming from schools. Acknowledging the wider pressures, roles and responsibilities of schools, this points to an opportunity to better equip schools to identify and escalate children who are at risk of requiring specialist local authority support.
As indicated in Figure 13, in 12% of cases, schools were the agency to have referred a child to local authority children’s social care services most recently prior to the child coming in to care.
This shift also points to the significance of placing focus and attention on how school representatives are integrated into multi- agency Family Help or Children Protection teams around individual children or families, and how this aspect of local reform implementation should be prioritised. Finally, the latest reforms to the SEND system include substantial investment in teacher training and leadership development. This presents an important opportunity to also ensure that early identification and prevention to help avoid children at risk from reaching the point of crisis are also core elements of this training and development, whilst taking account of teachers’ workloads and wellbeing in what is expected of them. They need to read what children are not saying, not just what they do say – that’s not
You might get lucky and have a school that really helps, or unlucky and have one that doesn’t know what to look for.” Care experienced young person – should have safeguarding training, because one adult is the one we choose to trust.” Care experienced young person 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 Every teacher – even cleaners
Figure 13: Percentage of care starts by last contact Percentage of care starts by last contact
5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30%
0%
being picked up in schools.” Care experienced young person
The service or organisation most recently in contact with the child prior to them entering care
Summary: the evidence suggests that schools are in sustained, regular contact with the children most at risk, often earlier and more consistently than any other service. As a result, schools could be more systematically integrated into the multi-agency work with families, in a prioritised way, to help make the most of that closer proximity.
What could be done differently? Successful delivery of this shift will recognise that, in most county areas, there are hundreds of primary schools, secondary schools and other education providers. However, children and families that require support will be unevenly distributed across these different education providers. In this context, using data to target support, and to align resources proportionately to levels of need becomes essential. Services should be designed using data in two key ways: • Using historic data to understand consistent patterns of need for support, connected to individual or groups of schools, and using this information to inform the structure of relevant services. • Using ‘live’ data about child or family support needs to inform a more flexible allocation of resources, connected to an individual school or to groups of schools.
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