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
For the 39% of children who enter care without being subject to an Early Help, Child in Need or Child Protection Plan in the six months before entering care, contacts data was analysed to understand whether the system highlighted these families as having the potential to benefit from local authority support at an earlier stage. The findings indicated that: • Just under half of these children had only had a single contact (in the four years of data) prior to coming into care. • Just over half of these children had two or more contacts before coming in to care. Considering the latter cohort, Figure 15 shows the timeframe between a child’s penultimate recorded interaction with children’s social services and the date of them coming into care.
Of the 61% of children who entered care that were subject to a local authority Early Help, Child in Need or Child Protection Plan in the six months before coming in to care, approximately two thirds (35% of all children) had only been subject to a Child Protection Plan before coming in to care. Whilst the scope of this work is confined to children who have entered the care system, practitioners engaged through this work emphasised that they felt a child would ideally not first receive specialist local authority support with the level of risk already at Child Protection threshold. They felt that ideally the child and family should first receive support at Early Help or Child In Need threshold. For the children that entered care after being subject to a children protection plan, this sentiment is compounded by 59% of those child protection plans being open for less than six months. Importantly, the analysis shows that, if pathways in to support at Early Help or Child in Need threshold levels of support remain the same, the introduction of Family Help services will only directly impact ~25% of children who would ultimately end up in care (as illustrated in Figure 14).
This analysis highlighted two key issues: 1. There appears to be potential to provide earlier targeted support up to 74% of children that ultimately enter care. 2. Improved information-sharing across agencies could be an enabler of identifying the families that could benefit from targeted, early support. Potential to provide targeted earlier support to 74% of children who enter care Analysis found that 61% of children had been subject to a local authority Early Help, Child in Need, or Child Protection Plan in the six months before coming in to care, as shown in Figure 14. As a result, 39% of children had not been subject to an Early Help, Child in Need or Child Protection Plan in the six months prior to entering care.
What does the evidence show? This programme has sought to analyse patterns in the support that children and their families receive before entering care. This has been used to identify what would need to be different in the whole system of support around families in the period prior to coming in to care, to safely and positively prevent the need for children to come in to care more often. To do this, the nature of support that children and young people were receiving in the six months before they entered the care system has been analysed. Each individual child and families’ circumstances will dictate the specific timeframe in which, if they could have been supported to stay together, that support would need to be delivered over. However, for the purposes of comparison this was the time period selected.
Figure 15: The length of time between a child’s penultimate contact with children’s social care and the point at which they were taken into care The length of time between a child's penultimate contact with children's social care and the point at which they were taken into care
Figure 14: Percentage of children and young people who received a support plan in the six months prior to coming into care Percentage of children and young people who received a support plan in the six months prior to coming into care
25%
20%
Directly into care EH/CiN --> Care EH/CiN --> CP --> Care CP --> Care
% of entries into care
39%
16% 10%
35%
15%
10%
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
5%
0%
0-4 weeks
1-3 months
3-6 months
6-9 months
9-12 months
12-15 months
15-18 months
18-21 months
21-24 months
24+ months
Police were involved multiple
times… but nothing happened afterwards. They protected me in the moment, but did nothing to change what was happening.” Care experienced young person
44
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