05: Impact of making these system shifts
Impact for children and families of making these system shifts To calculate the potential impact that successful implementation of the system shifts described in Section 3 could have for children and families, the primary evidence source has been the reviews of children’s stories by local practitioners. For each child, have remained in the care of their family if different support had been given. The results of this analysis, by current care setting type, are shown in Figure 22. Figure 22: How confident are we as practitioners that this child could have avoided being taken into care? practitioners were asked to give a level of confidence regarding whether the child could How confident are we as practitioners that this child could have avoided being taken into care?
Supported accommodation Residential placement Fostering placement Kinship fostering/ placed with family
Other
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
% of child journeys with the associated degree of confidence A degree of confidence Low or no confidence
Many of the same children identified through the case review exercise as having the potential to be supported to avoid entering the care system, were also deemed by practitioners to have the potential to exit it. Removing this double count leads to a 2.2% increase in the rate of children exiting the care system. To corroborate these numbers, the current rate of children entering or exiting care per 10,000 was calculated for county and CCN unitary member authorities and these changes applied to the average. The average with the improvement applied is still within observed current variation of children entering or exiting care across county and CCN unitary member authorities suggesting it is a reasonable level to expect as a result of system improvements. This is shown in Figure 23.
This data suggests that there is opportunity to support more children to be in the care of their family network, across children who are currently entering all different types of care. Therefore, further modelling has been done across all children in care, rather than seeking to draw conclusions about specific cohorts of children within care (e.g. those who are in kinship care vs residential etc). Given the acknowledged interconnectivity between different care settings (e.g. children in residential care due to a lack of capacity of foster care), it has been assumed that net impacts on numbers of children in care are distributed over all types of care. To determine the potential impact on numbers of children in care, the programme has assessed the confidence levels of practitioners; further information about the pathways of those children in to care; and wider data analysis around children entering the care system. This indicates a potential for 14.5% fewer children to potentially enter care as a result of the successful implementation of the five shifts proposed.
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