Independent Review of Children’s Social Care

Flick Drummond Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Edward Timpson (Eddisbury) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) for securing this important debate. Those of us who see this issue as one of the priorities of any Government, whatever that Government’s hue, always struggle to get a collective sense of responsibility in this House, let alone more widely across the country. That is why regularly bringing the issue to the Floor of the House is such a crucial part of ensuring that the good work that does go on is properly scrutinised, and ensuring that the support we give the most vulnerable children in our society is the best it possibly can be for their futures.

Like the hon. Member for York Central, I start by thanking all those who work in the child protection system and more widely in children’s social care. In some ways, relative to other services and agencies that work in the public sector, often in partnership with the private sector—such as the police and the education system—our child protection system is one of the least mature. We are still learning; we are still understanding how best to provide the services that those families and children need, at the right time and in the right way. However, relative to the international child protection systems that exist, we are actually quite mature, and many countries around the world look to us when trying to understand what a child protection system looks like—we have to remember that many countries do not even have one. When thanking those who work within the child protection system and children’s social care, it is worth remembering that in many ways they are at the vanguard of what we know works, while always looking to improve.

That is why this report from Josh MacAlister and all those who worked with him—which is analytically strong, well-evidenced, and ambitiously couched in terms of deliverable, whole-system change—gives those of us who want to see further improvement a really ambitious programme of work that needs a full, comprehensive and long-term commitment from the Government, not just the Department for Education. I know that the Minister—I welcome her to her place—cares passionately about these issues, but other Government Departments right across Whitehall will themselves have a part to play, and will benefit should these reforms be put in place in their entirety and taken to their conclusion.

It is also worth saying that this report is not the first part of the journey. Many Governments with the right intentions have managed to get cross-party agreement about the importance of vulnerable children and families, and how we can provide them with what they need; we may have a different view about what that looks like, but the aim and intention remain the same, irrespective of who is making those decisions.

When I look back on my time as Minister for Children and Families between 2012 and 2017, I think we made some really important changes during that period, not least through the Children and Families Act 2014 and the Children and Social Work Act 2017. Quite unbelievably, no amendments to either Bill were pushed to a vote on Report, as I remember—perhaps the Bill in 2017 had one or two, although not in my area of policy, of course. That shows that there is a consensus on much of what those two important pieces of legislation were trying to achieve, and what this independent review and report are trying to achieve.

The hon. Member for York Central rightly talked about blueprints. The report provides a strong and comprehensive blueprint for how we reform, revive and renew children’s services right across the country, but when the Minister is looking at how it can be implemented, I ask her to learn from what we have tried before and what has been found difficult to achieve. I take as an example, in an unashamedly self-promoting way, the “Putting children first” strategy that we published in July 2016, during my time at the Department for Education. That was a vision for children’s social care and services based on three pillars: people and leadership, practice and systems, and governance and accountability. In many ways, the strategy reflected a lot of what we see in Josh MacAlister’s report, which leads me to the conclusion that much of this is about having the ongoing will, determination and commitment to implement many of those reforms and the vision behind them.

We can look at examples of where we have managed to make some of those changes happen and assess the impact they have had on children’s lives, such as the pupil premium plus, which provided additional money for children in care. That policy has been expanded to cover those who are under special guardianship orders and those who are adopted. Since that policy was introduced, over £350 million has been spent on providing those children with support through virtual school heads—a not insubstantial amount of money, but also a recognition that there needs to be additional support at the time those children would otherwise fall further behind. We can also look at the change to the law regarding the age at which children leave foster care—the staying-put arrangements. From the report, pleasingly, those changes have led to a doubling of the time that children who stay in foster care beyond the age of 18 remain in full- time education.

Those changes in themselves are not going to solve the myriad issues that this very well-evidenced report raises, but they demonstrate what can be achieved if we look carefully at where we are falling short, and how we can put in place a strategy, a plan, and a practical, deliverable outcome that can be measured to see what works. That is what sat behind the children’s social care innovation programme that I also set up during my time as Minister.

[Mrs Flick Drummond (Meon Valley) (Con)]

My hon. and learned Friend speaks with such knowledge and experience. Does he agree that there is often a cliff edge at age 18 when children in care are sent out into the big wide world? They really need to have that care and support all the way up to 25.

[Edward Timpson]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is what was behind the staying-put reforms, as well as the introduction of “staying close” for those who are not in foster care—they have perhaps been in residential care—but need to maintain a relationship and a network of support close to where they live.

North Yorkshire County Council, in particular, started the No Wrong Door project through the innovation programme, which has morphed into what I think is called Always Here. In our own families, where we are lucky enough to be able to do so, we will still be bouncing back at times of need. We have that rock; that stability. As my hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley (Mrs Drummond) knows, my parents fostered for many years. We still have children who came to live with us through their childhood—sometimes just for a few weeks, sometimes for many months, and sometimes for a long time—and are now in their 20s, or sometimes in their 30s, who come back to us for reassurance at a time when they may be at a low ebb and do not know where else to turn. That is where the cliff edge for those who do not have that stability becomes so drastic, and poor outcomes will inevitably follow.

We know what those outcomes are for care leavers. About one quarter of the prison population are care leavers, as are, I think, 26% of those who are street homeless. Those are hugely disproportionate numbers compared with the rest of the population, which is all the more reason why Josh MacAlister’s independent review, particularly the five missions for those leaving care—I will talk about those later—is so crucial when it comes to turning the progress that has been made into a greater and more extrapolated offer to the 13,000 or 14,000 children who leave the care system every year.

Through the innovation programme, about £200 million was ultimately invested in new approaches, with about 50 evidence-based projects across the country to understand new ways of delivering children’s services better, more effectively and often more efficiently. The MacAlister review gives the example of the Hertfordshire family safeguarding model, which was built around the idea of having multidisciplinary teams around a child and their family—it is actually very similar to the reclaiming social work model that was used in Hackney over a decade ago and was led by Isabelle Trowler, who is now the chief social worker.

The programme has been evaluated and shown to bring significant improvements to outcomes and reductions in the use of care and the time children spend in care. Not only is it good for children and families, because it keeps bonds close and improves outcomes, but in its first year it meant savings for the council alone of more than £2.6 million, which it could reinvest in services, perhaps at an earlier stage when intervention is needed.

The innovation programme did not come about through making technical fixes. To go back to the point that the hon. Member for York Central made about leadership, it came about because there was a real sense of ownership across the multidisciplinary teams and a passionate belief in the reforms that they sought to carry out. I could give other examples from the programme that now form the basis of how we do children’s social better across our country.

I know that Ofsted judgments are only one way of looking at children’s social care services, but I remember that when I first became Minister for Children and Families, only one council—I think it may have been the tri-borough —was rated as outstanding. We had far too many inadequate councils, for many reasons that unfortunately still exist: pressures of work, caseloads, poor interactions between services and opaque ways of understanding what works, leading to the same mistakes being repeated over and over. We do not want any inadequate councils—we want them all to be outstanding—but although I accept that there is still a huge amount of work to do, the good news is that there has been a really good trajectory. I think about 20 councils are now rated as outstanding and about 60 as good, although we still have 17 inadequate councils, which is 17 too many.

Part of the solution, which has already started and which the MacAlister review wants to turbocharge, is in how we intervene on councils that are failing vulnerable children and families in their area. We began that process by being more interventionist and more creative in how we go about breaking the cycle of failure in children’s services. Some are small, such as Doncaster; others are much bigger, such as Birmingham, which was a perennial problem for many years. Sometimes the answer was to work closely with them, put a commissioner in, change the practice, change the leadership and change the culture. On other occasions, the answer was to take the direct running of services away from the council and create a children’s trust focused solely on improving the lives and outcomes of children in and around the care system.

In most cases, although not all, that approach has led to real and occasionally dramatic improvement. Sunderland went from inadequate to outstanding in three years. Having been inadequate in 2013, the Isle of Wight, which was partnered with Hampshire, an excellent council, was good by 2019 and getting close to outstanding. There are ways for the Government to be more directly involved in ensuring that we understand at an earlier stage where things are going wrong and try to fix them.

I want to take a moment to draw out some of the key aspects of the MacAlister review, which builds on much of the work done since 2012, or arguably since the Munro review in 2010 and 2011 showed us where we needed to improve. It is worth taking into account other policies across Government, such as the Start for Life programme and the introduction of family hubs, which complement the MacAlister report’s recommendations.

Family help is key. We have had many debates about how intervention is often too late or too un-co-ordinated and how we often put people through a statutory process but nothing happens directly with families to improve the situation on the ground. The principle of family help, which I support, is to address that issue by bringing in a multidisciplinary team at an earlier stage when there are signs of difficulty. School is a good place to find out where the problems may be. So is the community, one would hope: communities are perhaps not as close as they were a few years ago, but they can be a really good source of information that enables us to understand where family help can work.

Fundamental to successful intervention is having an expert child protection practitioner who can co-ordinate the multidisciplinary team. When I worked on family law cases before I came to Parliament, one of my frustrations was that in many cases the social worker was very new and was not that experienced. Those who were experienced had been floated off into management, where they were far away from families and were doing no direct work whatever.

I am not saying that it has not already happened anywhere—the reclaiming social work model was based around the same idea—but moving towards a family help approach in which someone with real expertise is at the heart of decision making day by day, with families and with a multidisciplinary team structure, seems a sensible way to go. When I chaired the national Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, we could see even then, from the child exploitation cases that came to us and from our thematic review, that that was one of the failings that often led to children spiralling into county lines and other forms of exploitation.

That is why the changes that we have made to safeguarding partnerships are so vital. At the moment, statutorily, they get the local authority, the police and the health team working together at a senior level on strategies to create a good child safeguarding system in their area. However, it has now come to the point where schools also need to come on board; Sir Alan Wood, who has done an updated report after his original review, has made the same recommendation. More work needs to be done on how to make that happen and what it will look like, but schools are so fundamental to the effectiveness of safeguarding partnerships and family help. As the first point of contact with children and families, schools can often spot something that is not right, such as the child’s attendance or appearance or their parents’ interaction with the school. I urge the Minister to ensure that Government look positively at that in their response.

I also urge the Government to look at family networks. As I said, communities may not be as robust or as involved as they once were. Unfortunately, most of our community life now tends to happen online, like the dreaded neighbourhood WhatsApp or Facebook groups that tell us a lot about lost cats or about other things that are not quite so interesting. Reconnecting children with uncles, aunts, grandparents and wider family is a way of ensuring that they have a greater network to fall back on in times of crisis, rather than having to rely on the state.

I remember once doing a case in Chester county court. The judge was on the cusp of making a care order to take a child permanently into the care of the local authority with a plan for adoption, but at the last minute, the guardian representing the child asked—perhaps in hindsight—the rather obvious question: “Have you asked any of the wider family whether they would be willing, either individually or collectively, to help to look after this child?” The answer came back, “No”. The case was adjourned, some work was done with the family, and a few months later, we came back to court and the plan had been changed: the child was going to live with their aunt, and other family members would be involved as well. That type of work with children who may be going through a period of crisis in their own home, and the involvement of families, has to happen at an earlier stage and has to happen everywhere. The recommendation on family group conferences, or family-led alternative plans for care, should be taken seriously.

On residential care, I think it worth recognising that in England, about 14% of children in care are now in residential care. In Scotland, that figure stands at only 7%, which begs the question: why? For me, it falls back to the important point raised by the hon. Member for York Central about the use and understanding of foster care. We know—Ofsted have shown this—that there is a worrying increase in the number of children whose care plan is for fostering but who end up in residential care. Why do they end up in residential care? Because they cannot find a placement in foster care—or cannot find the right placement. It also means that we are losing foster carers who have a particular specialism, perhaps in teenagers or—like my parents—in babies born addicted to heroin, for whom particular skills are needed. That placement is lost because they are the only carers available for another child who could be in a different type of foster placement.

We need a real recruitment drive for foster carers. We have seen, through the Ukrainian refugee scheme, that there is a huge amount of will out there—people want to reach out—but there needs to be some greater voice coming from Government about how we find the 9,000 carers whom we need and about the range and spread of where foster carers are. Otherwise, we will put more pressure on residential care and prices will go up exponentially. It just does not make sense to keep putting more children into residential care when that is not even their plan and there are financial consequences to doing so.

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[Mrs Flick Drummond (Meon Valley) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) and the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) on securing this debate, but I also thank Josh MacAlister for the work he has done to produce this report. The Department for Education says that this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reform children’s social care. I certainly mean no criticism of Mr MacAlister or the hard-working people in children’s social care, but it is not good enough that we have to conduct strategic-levels of this topic. As Mr MacAlister says, he has tried to echo the message from other reviews over the last 30 years. We debate the issue regularly in the House, and we have all kinds of reports and reviews, including the one I worked on with my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham in 2007 called “No more blame game: the future for children’s social workers”, which pointed out much that is in this report. That was 15 years ago.

There is an unacceptable recurrence of tragic cases of neglect and agency failure that generate great emotion, press coverage and the political will to change, with reports published—Baby P, Damilola Taylor, Victoria Climbié, Star Hobson, Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, all the way to the tragic death of Awaab Ishak. Children are all too often still becoming victims because their circumstances are not identified or followed up. While some of the cases become high-profile nationally, many others emerge all the time across the country without getting more than local coverage in the media.

I want to concentrate on a few points where we need change in this big and complex area. The first relates to expert practitioners, which is mentioned in the report. One of the recommendations in the report is that any case of significant harm should be overseen by an expert practitioner alongside the family help team. The suggestion in the report is that those should be initially recruited on the basis that they can demonstrate skills from their time in practice, with a future standard of completing a five-year early career framework.

I welcome the establishment of a standard for expert practitioners and the early career framework. We have to keep more social workers in the profession, to form the core of our expert practitioners. The picture for early career social workers is similar to that for teachers: many leave within five years of beginning their career and others move from local authority posts into agency roles. Another persistent feature is that our most experienced and able social workers are taken out of practising with children and families and moved into management roles. We asked for a career path at the frontline in the 2007 report. I am not decrying the need for good management of social care—I would argue that it needs to be improved, if anything, given the record of failures in child protection—but it would benefit everyone if more senior workers were practising and passing on their skills and experience to others in a direct way. It would improve the management of services to have experienced eyes and ears able to feed back where things are going badly and where they are going well.

The next point is advocacy. The report highlights the potential for confusion for young people about who should be speaking up for them. Independent reviewing officers are often not engaged enough with children to be effective advocates. We need a clear plan for replacing IROs, and the recommendations of the report are clear about that. I look forward to seeing the Government’s full response, but I would welcome any thoughts from the Minister, who I welcome to her place, on when the Department intends to consult on a framework for advocacy. That includes advocacy for parents and for other family members acting in that role. The report finds that parents are too often viewers of child protection conferences, rather than participants. Although the report is less prescriptive on this aspect, I hope Ministers will consider a formal framework for it.

Too many children are disappearing off the radar when their parents tell local authorities that they are home-schooling their children. I know that many parents can arrange a good education for their child, but it is still important that the development and safety of children who are not in school can be monitored. I appreciate the concerns that some parents have about being registered. However, the evidence shows that we must act to look after the needs of children who are currently not being educated and cared for properly.

I am concerned that the Government might be slipping back from the long-held position that there should be registration of children being home-schooled. In a written answer on part 4 of the Schools Bill on 7 November, Baroness Barran said:

“The department’s position on the Schools Bill will be confirmed in due course.”

On Monday, the Schools Minister said in a written answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (David Morris) that the Department is satisfied that the existing powers local authorities have are sufficient. Can the Minister tell me whether this means that registration of home-schooled children is not now being proceeded with? If the register is being scrapped, what has prompted the change of mind on the part of Government from their long-held view, which I share, that this is important for the welfare of children?

Local authorities do great work to support children across a range of educational settings. I pay tribute to the work being done by Hampshire County Council, its leader, Councillor Rob Humby, the deputy leader and former executive member for children, Councillor Roz Chadd, and in particular, the director of children’s services, Steve Crocker. Hampshire’s children’s services are outstanding—not excellent, but outstanding. Families in Meon Valley have a great team looking after them, but I am concerned after my recent meeting here in Parliament with Rob Humby and Roz Chadd that the funding pressures they face risk the delivery of statutory and core services. I am conscious that we are talking today about how services can be improved, but they have to be funded, and I will write to Ministers about this shortly to support the work that Hampshire is doing.

Another aspect of local authority work in Hampshire that I want to highlight and praise is fostering. I recently visited a meeting of foster carers from across the county in Hampshire’s Hive pilot scheme, led by Amy Alexander and Kat Roberts, which is similar to the Mockingbird scheme that the hon. Member for York Central mentioned. The Hive model creates local groups of foster carers that are led by carer support workers, who are themselves foster carers. This helps to develop support networks for carers and encourages the development of a sense of community.

There are currently 12 hives in the pilot scheme across Hampshire and I am delighted that one is working in Waterlooville in my constituency. I look forward to meeting with Johnny Creighton and his team of families soon. The Hive model is part of a wider package of support for fostering, and I hope that it will encourage more families to look at getting involved. It can be so rewarding for foster families, as we heard from my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Edward Timpson), as well as for the children who become part of those families.

We should also look at what charitable and social organisations can do to help young people get a sense of what is possible in life and to build their resilience. I am thinking particularly of organisations such as Plan B in Gosport, Hampshire, where John Gillard has been working for many years with young people, including some from my constituency, who have lost contact with mainstream education. John uses his skills as a sailor to involve young people in maritime-based skills and activities, as well as education. That includes boatbuilding, carpentry, sailing and all kinds of practical skills that deliver real vocational training for young people. That kind of alternative provision is a perfect opportunity for many young people from troubled backgrounds to find a sense of direction. John has helped to turn many young lives around; he is an extraordinary man.

I could not finish without mentioning this issue to the Department for Education. One reason that I am keen to have a reformed assessment at 18 is that many children have a false start in education and our current assessment methods fail them. Many children find something like Plan B, or some other vocational setting that really inspires them, quite late in their childhood. They deserve the chance to have an assessment framework that recognises their needs and sets them on course for a career and an independent life. Education and social care have to work together and work in the same direction to improve the life chances of young people from troubled or disadvantaged backgrounds.

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[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) and the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) on securing this important debate, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting it.

Set against the enormity of the challenges facing the children’s social care sector, the vital importance of the sector in seeking to support families and keep the most vulnerable children safe, and the urgency of the need for reform, far too little attention has been paid in this Chamber to children’s social care in recent months. In particular, it has been six months since the independent review of children’s social care was published. Aside from a short oral statement during publication, there has been no opportunity for detailed consideration and discussion of its contents. This debate is long overdue.

I would like to thank all hon. Members who contributed today. We have heard—at great length, if I may say—from Members with very significant experience of children’s social care. My hon. Friend the Member for York Central made a powerful opening speech, setting out clearly the pressures crowding in on families and the urgency of the need for change. She also highlighted the costs of doing nothing.

The hon. and learned Member for Eddisbury (Edward Timpson), a former Minister well-respected for his time in Government, evidenced by the fact that he managed to remain in post for five years—that makes him a real veteran by contemporary standards, since the Minister’s post has been something of a revolving chair in recent months—spoke of some of the innovations that can help to drive improvement in children’s social care and the importance of improving support for care leavers. I certainly agree on both points. The hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) spoke of the need for support for kinship carers and the importance of work to address childhood trauma.

The hon. Member for Meon Valley (Mrs Drummond) mentioned some of the charities in her constituency that do important work with vulnerable children and young people. She spoke of the lack of progress in response to previous reviews. She also mentioned the death of Damilola Taylor. Madam Deputy Speaker, I feel I must correct the record on that point. She mentioned Damilola Taylor in a list of children who died due to safeguarding failings at the hands of parents and carers. Damilola Taylor was murdered by strangers on his way home from school. It happened very close to my constituency and I just feel I must, for his family, set the record straight on that point.

[Mrs Drummond]

indicated assent.

[Helen Hayes]

The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) referenced the importance of training and support for professionals working with vulnerable children and young people, and the importance of independent advocacy. The hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Dr Mullan), who is not in his place, mentioned the importance of recruiting foster carers and highlighted the very poor conversion rate from people who express an interest in foster care to those who eventually become foster carers.

The hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds) spoke from his experience as a local authority lead member for children’s social care over many years and was right to highlight the transformative impact of high-quality youth work, as well as early help. Finally, another former Minister, the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham, made many points in his speech, but again highlighted the catalogue of reports and reviews produced over 10 years and the lack of progress in taking up the challenge of really delivering for children.

There is, as we have seen in the debate, a high level of consensus on children’s social care and the need for change is indeed urgent. The independent review’s “Case for Change” document, published in 2021, is unequivocal. The number of children, particularly the number of older children, in the care system is increasing and the outcomes for people with care experience are getting worse. Care-experienced people are 70% more likely to die prematurely than those who have not been in the care system. Care-experienced people are overrepresented in the prison system. Their educational attainment and levels of employment are lower, and they are far more likely to be homeless.

The appalling tragedies that have made the headlines in recent months, of children murdered by people who should have loved and nurtured them, remind us of the grave responsibilities that children’s social workers carry. Their decisions about the welfare of the most vulnerable children can literally be a matter of life or death. I pay tribute to social workers across the country who are working every day to support families, to keep children safe, and to provide stability and security for looked-after children, but they are all too often working in incredibly difficult circumstances. The most recent survey of social workers by the British Association of Social Workers revealed that more than a third reported that their caseload had increased since the start of the covid-19 pandemic. The Department for Education’s own analysis shows that the number of children’s social workers quitting children’s services altogether rose more than a fifth during 2021.

As many hon. Members have highlighted, the situation is very challenging for kinship carers—people who step in to care for a child who is a family member or close friend when their birth parents cannot do so. Kinship carers do an incredible job, maintaining family links that might be lost if the child was taken into the care of the local authority, providing love and stability. However, according to the most recently published survey by the charity Kinship, more than two thirds of kinship carers feel that they are not getting the support they need. That is surely not acceptable.

The past 12 years of Conservative Government have seen early help and support services for families decimated across much of the country. As many councils have lost more than 50% of the funding they receive from central Government, they have been forced to focus increasingly stretched resources on statutory services, including child protection. Over the 10 years from 2010-11 to 2020-21, investment in early intervention support fell by a staggering 50%, while spending on crisis and late intervention services has increased by more than a third. That loss of capacity is a disaster for child protection services. Without early help and support, more and more families struggle to provide appropriate care for their children. By failing to invest in early support, the Government are allowing families to fall into crisis, picking up the pieces only when it is often too late.

The independent review of children’s social care cites parenting in a context of adversity as the reason that the majority of families become involved with children’s social care. Many of the issues that cause families, and particularly children, to fall into a situation of vulnerability or danger have their roots in the poverty and inequality in our country that have deepened and widened on the Government’s watch. As we debate children’s social care and the interventions that exist to provide the safety net for children, we must not lose sight of the wider context, which has such a significant impact on the lives of children across our country.

While the policies of the Conservatives have fuelled the growing crisis in children’s social care, they have been complacent in responding to it. Across England, 50% of local authority children’s services departments are rated “inadequate” or “requires improvement” by Ofsted. That will be for a variety of reasons, including a lack of resources, but resources are clearly not the whole picture.

I want to take this opportunity to congratulate Southwark Council, one of my local authorities, on its “good” Ofsted rating for children’s services, which was published last week. The political and officer leadership team in Southwark have managed to continue to deliver good, child-centred services, despite the council as a whole experiencing among the highest level of cuts in the country.

The reasons for poor performance in some local authorities will vary, and I do not seek to lay the blame at the feet of hard-working frontline social workers. However, the lack of grip on the situation from the Government is inexcusable. The Government have been content to preside over a shocking level of failure in children’s services departments and that is simply not good enough.