Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (First sitting) Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateCatherine Atkinson
Main Page: Catherine Atkinson (Labour - Derby North)Department Debates - View all Catherine Atkinson's debates with the Department for Education
(1 day, 13 hours ago)
Public Bill CommitteesQ
Ruth Stanier: We certainly would want to see corporate parenting duties extended at a national level to Government Departments and relevant public sector bodies. We think that is incredibly important. Otherwise, we are very much supportive of the measures in the Bill in respect of the kinship offer, though we think it is important that there is a clear threshold for that support so that it is realistic and affordable and can be implemented.
Andy Smith: I would support that. A national offer for care leavers is an interesting concept. There should be some absolute minimum requirements we expect in an offer, and I think you would broadly see that in many councils in what is provided for children in care and for care leavers. It is usually co-produced with representatives who were care leavers, and with councils and so on. I think that would be an important reflection within the context of a much broader understanding of corporate parenting.
Q
Ruth Stanier: We very much think that the measures in the Bill will help to pull funding to the left, further upstream into prevention. We warmly welcome the Government’s recent investment in the children’s prevention grant. We think that the measures should help to improve outcomes and reduce costs over the longer term.
Andy Smith: It is absolutely a false economy not to invest in early help and early intervention. We know that the evidence base is so strong on children escalating into higher-cost services. My authority has invested in early help services, and we have an edge of care team that targets children on the edge of the care system. When we are able to prevent them from going into care, we track the cost avoidance, looking at what a typical placement might have cost. We have saved in excess of £5 million over the last three years in cost avoidance.
The case is well argued. The challenge is that councils are at different starting points because of the way in which funding has been eroded over the last 10 years and the fact that many councils have to prioritise the higher-cost services, which often take away from early intervention. It is a false economy. If we can get the funding right, the Bill offers us an opportunity to invest in family help and early help services and start to see impacts much more consistently. We are beginning to see some of that from the 12 Families First pilots that are taking place.
Q
Andy Smith: I cannot absolutely rule that out. We have significant churn in social work, and that is part of the challenge—that we are struggling, as a system, to recruit and retain social workers. We have lots of routes into social work, and we are doing lots to promote the role. I am a social worker. I love it, and it is brilliant, even though I have not practised for a number of years now. The measures in the Bill will go some way in setting some rules around how and when social workers can move into agency social work, but I cannot guarantee that it will stop or prevent the churn in the system. The Bill outlines one tool that will help with the stability that we need in the workforce, and that ultimately leads to better outcomes for children.
Q
Jacky Tiotto: It is difficult. We have primary legislation in the Children Act 1989 that says that, in this country, we think the best place for children is growing up in their family or with relatives. When the 30-year review of the Children Act happened, people still signed up to that; this Bill definitely reminds us and provokes that intention again.
The difficulty is that the formality around protecting children is burdensome, rightly so. So in my view some of the construction of this has to be a bit more thoughtful about the children who are going to do well in their families and the children who are not going to stand a chance and need, quickly, to move to permanence and to other places.
Residential care is not doing particularly well for children with very special needs. We struggle to recruit foster carers because the resources around them are not there. It is the shape of what is around those other places, not residential care, that needs to be elevated, in order to reduce the number of children coming into care. Just having family group decision-making conferences or kinship alone is not enough; I do not know anyone saying it is.
I do not know how many of you are familiar with the chief social worker paper from a few years ago called “Care proceedings in England: the case for clear blue water”. A very good, strong case was made for, “Don’t come into court with children where it is going to end up either with them back at home or with a supervision order that gives no statutory power to the local authority. Come into court for the kids that really need a care order and protection and to go somewhere.” We could revisit the extent to which that is an effective situation.
A third of children who come into family proceedings now either remain at home or go back home. I make no judgment about that, but a third of children going through family proceedings is expensive. We need to think about what the point at issue was and what was needed at the time. Will the serving of that order deal with the problem at the time? Often, what has gone wrong in child protection will not be solved by just making a court order, particularly a supervision order. I could be here for a long time on that, but that is another Bill, probably another day.
Q
Jacky Tiotto: I do not think so, in terms of the strengthening of section 25 of the 1989 Act so that other accommodation can be used that is not a secure children’s home, but I think there is a gross underestimation of how intensive it is to look after those children. That is not just a today thing—it has been coming for 20 years, when we stopped running children’s homes in local authorities, really. The provision of the accommodation in the way that the Bill sets out is good but, as I said before, the issue is about who runs it and how much the staffing costs are for running very specialist provision—