an Early Help, Child in Need, Child Protection or Child in Care plan). This shows how local authorities filter a large number of contacts to a smaller number of families that receive ongoing support, following multiple rigorous, statutory processes. This is critical for two reasons: 1. The existing evidence base regarding the negative consequences on families of unnecessarily intervening in their lives. 2. It would be impractical, from a resource perspective, to provide ongoing support to every child and family reported to the local authority’s contact centre. Given these statistics, it is understandable that Directors of Children’s Services described identifying these children as like ‘spotting a needle in a haystack’.
Sharing of information to enable the provision of targeted support at an early opportunity The multi-agency case reviews of more than 100 children that had been in care highlighted the impact of limited information sharing across agencies and local authorities. As shown in Figure 4 earlier in the report, local practitioners identified that the second most common reason for not identifying families earlier and offering improved preventative or reconnecting support was due to information sharing and co-ordination between different agencies and local authorities. This corroborates the hypothesis born out of the data analysis described in the previous section, that there is potential in the children’s services ‘ecosystem’ to help more families to receive specialist local authority support at an earlier point.
When reviewing case notes of 380+ children that had been in care, the most common agencies that had a prior interaction with the child or family (excluding police and local authority children’s social care) were health services including GPs and midwifery; schools; and support for mental health difficulties (both child and adult). Overall, 45% of families whose journeys were reviewed interacted with a GP or another health service prior to entering care and 41% interacted with police. This is shown in Figure 17. Having a prior interaction with these families means that these agencies were therefore likely to hold important information about the child and family that could inform earlier, proactive support.
This data indicates that 46% of the cohort were the subject of a contact with the local authorities’ children’s social care department six months or more before the child came in to care. This raises the potential question of whether, for some children, support from local authority specialists from the earlier contact date could have ultimately helped prevent them from entering care. This should of course be taken in the context of the large number of children and families that local authorities need to make decisions about the proportionate level of support needed, based on their individual circumstances. To illustrate this, the nine data phase authorities receive 230,000 contacts from partners and parents reporting concerns about the welfare of a child each year. Within this, 50,000 children go on to receive some form of ongoing support plan from a local authority safeguarding specialist (through
Figure 17: Most prevalent service interactions for children and their families, prior to the child entering care Most prevalent service interactions for children and their families, prior to the child entering care
Figure 16: Proportion of children entering care who were known to children’s social care previously, and the relationship between the length of their plan or the number of referrals they had from the community
70%
60%
50%
40%
Children entering care 100%
30%
20%
10%
No prior interactions 40%
Have prior interactions* 60%
0%
Plan open <6 months before care entry 32.4%
Plan open >6 months before care entry 27.6%
<2 contacts 18.4%
2+ contacts 21.6%
Services interacted with by the child and their family
Contact 6+ months before
Contact <6 months before entry 11.7%
entry 9.9%
* an Early Help, Child in Need or Child Protection plan within 6 months of entering care
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