Seven more councils have been chosen to test the government’s family support and child protection reforms.

They will join the existing three families first for children pathfinders in testing the changes, which are designed to ensure families receive better and earlier support to help resolve their needs and strengthen the quality of child protection practice.

What the reforms comprise

The reforms, set out in the 2023 Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy, comprise: 

1. Setting up multi-disciplinary family help teams, through the merger of existing targeted early help and child in need services, to provide more effective and non-stigmatising support to families. As part of this, non-social workers will hold child in need cases.
2. Appointing experienced and skilled social workers as lead child protection practitioners (LCPPs). They will hold all child protection cases, working in tandem with family help practitioners already involved with the family and supported by practitioners from other agencies – notably health and police – who are also particularly skilled in safeguarding.
3. Making greater use of family networks when families need help, through increased use of family group decision making and the provision of support packages to remove financial and practical barriers to networks providing this support.
4. Strengthening multi-agency safeguarding leadership, including through ensuring members of strategic partnerships are sufficiently senior to make decisions on behalf of their agency, and increasing the role of education.

Dorset, Lincolnshire and Wolverhampton councils started testing the changes in September 2023 and will be joined, later in 2024, by Lewisham, Luton, Redbridge, Walsall, Warrington, Warwickshire and Wirral.

This means there are no pathfinder authorities from the North East, South East or from Yorkshire and the Humber.

Controversial workforce changes

The reforms are controversial, with the British Association of Social Workers and Ofsted having raised concerns about the safeguarding risks arising from removing the requirement for social workers to hold child in need cases.

Meanwhile, both Ofsted and the Association of Directors of Children’s Services have voiced misgivings about the impact of the lead child protection practitioner role on social work retention, in the context of mounting vacancy rates in local authority children’s services.

The three original pathfinders also shared early challenges on implementing the lead practitioner role in a conference session last autumn, including retaining staff, maintaining safeguarding skills among other social workers and avoiding disruption to families

The DfE has allocated about £37m to the pathfinder programme from July 2023 to March 2025.

Children’s services leaders must foster the conditions for professional curiosity and challenge to improve the quality of child protection practice, the national safeguarding body has said.

The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel said senior managers needed to give practitioners the “time, resources, and training” necessary for effective safeguarding, as well as promote “safe professional challenge” within and between agencies.

In an echo of previous studies, the panel’s 2022-23 annual report found that a lack of professional curiosity and challenge were among key deficits flagged up in rapid reviews of serious cases carried out by local safeguarding partnerships over the past year.

The panel, which examined 393 cases, found an over-optimism concerning parents’ capacity to give safe care and an over-reliance on parental self-report, with missed “opportunities” to triangulate this information with that from other sources.

Lack of critical thinking

The lack of critical thinking was evident in cases involving children aged under one, who accounted for 36% of the reviews, all of which involved death or serious harm to a child where abuse or neglect was known or suspected.

This included information not being identified or sought in relation to risk factors such as domestic abuse, for example, when certain behaviours were not recognised as signs of coercive or controlling behaviour.

The panel also reiterated messages from its 2021 report on safeguarding babies from male carers, including practitioners not challenging fathers or adult partners about their engagement and accepting at face value mothers’ account of separation from partners.

Criticisms of domestic abuse practice

More broadly, in relation to domestic abuse, the review criticised a reliance on removing perpetrators from the family home in order to reduce risk.

In some cases, practitioners did not consider the risks to children of ongoing contact, while the report also identified instances where staff did not consider fathers’ protective role in their children’s care.

For example, in one case, a child’s death was linked to a neglect of his serious medical condition. This was after his father, who played a significant role in his care, was removed from the family home.

Not seeing underlying issues behind behaviour

The panel also criticised a failure to see behind a child’s behaviour to identify underlying causes, an issue that was evident in cases of extrafamilial harm.

“In these cases, behaviour was viewed as the issue to deal with and manage as opposed to exploring and understanding the underlying cause, which was often associated with vulnerabilities such as mental health,” the report said.

“There were examples where practitioners referred to children as ‘troublesome’ or ‘problematic’ and where victim-blaming language was used in reports or case records.”

This also applied to some practice with families from black and minority ethnic communities, with “missed opportunities” to consider the wider social harms and inequalities they faced.

This included the practice of ‘adultifying’ some black children, by treating them as responsible for their actions and not recognising their needs, and emphasising criminal behaviour over their welfare.

‘Limited consideration’ of leaders’ role

While most reviews focused on identifying learning for practitioners and, to some extent, local safeguarding systems, the panel found “very limited consideration or analysis of the role and accountability of senior and middle managers and learning that may be specific to them”.

However, the panel stressed the importance of effective leadership and culture.

It identified cases where practitioners would have benefited from more time, resources and training to gain knowledge, skill or confidence, both in relation to child protection conferences and multi-agency processes and in relation to specific areas of practice”.

As well as domestic abuse and extrafamilial harm, the report highlighted skills gaps in a number of areas, including intrafamilial child sexual abuse, so-called honour-based abuse and complex mental health issues.

Lack of professional challenge

In relation to professional challenge, the report found practitioners not challenging partner agencies on their responses to ongoing concerns or their failure to provide requested or necessary information to inform assessments and decision-making.

For example, in one case, the review found some practitioners were “hesitant to express their views in conferences as they lacked training and were not able to be fully prepared before attending”.

The panel said that this was also something leaders could foster in, and between, their organisations, along with tackling the “perennial” issue of inadequate information sharing.

“Effective, joined up safeguarding leadership is pivotal in creating the conditions in which practitioners will seek, share and piece together information effectively, where there are high levels of trust and challenge and where there is honest and routine feedback about what is working well and what is not,” it said.

Good practice highlighted 

Alongside its criticisms, the report highlighted examples of good practice by safeguarding partnerships.

For example, some were encouraging peer-to-peer support and group supervision across agencies, which was increasing professional curiosity and understanding of partners’ processes.

Some reviews showed practice that considered the social exclusion of black and minority ethnic children, which was particularly evident in more ethnically diverse areas or where practitioners themselves were from similar backgrounds.

In relation to domestic abuse and practice with babies, the panel praised practitioners who were persistent in engaging mothers who were reluctant to engage and in identifying fathers, including where mothers were reluctant to divulge their identities.

‘Critical’ barriers to good safeguarding

As well as practice, leadership and inter-agency issues, the panel cited four “critical issues” that safeguarding partners reported were hindering their ability to protect children:

1. “A discernible increase in the numbers of children” with mental health issues, with evidence of increased waiting times for assessment, diagnosis and services.
2. The insufficiency of care placements, leaving “too many children…living at considerable distances from their family and community networks”.
3. “Major challenges in workforce recruitment and retention”, particularly for social workers and health visitors, leading to increased reliance on agency staff, who were less able to build meaningful relationships with children and families.
4. Long-term reductions in resources for early help and prevention services.

In her foreword to the report, panel chair Annie Hudson said: “Funding, recruitment, and retention pressures have had a discernible impact on the delivery of the best safeguarding practice to children and families.

“Despite these system stressors, practitioners and leaders are bringing remarkable creativity and resourcefulness to helping children and families.”

DfE’s children’s social care reforms

The report also referenced the Department for Education’s children’s social care reform agenda, including the current ‘families first for children pathfinders’ testing its proposed new approach to family support and child protection.

This involves the merger of targeted early help and children in need services within multidisciplinary ‘family help’ teams, designed to provide more effective and less stigmatising support to prevent families’ needs from escalating.

Where cases do escalate to child protection, family help teams co-work cases with ‘lead child protection practitioners’ (LCPP), specialist social workers who are also part of multi-agency child protection teams.

These child protection reforms are based on the proposal for multi-agency child protection units put forward by the panel in its 2022 review into the deaths of Star Hobson and Arthur Labinjo-Hughes.

Panel defends child protection team proposal

The existing pathfinders have reported challenges in relation to the LCPP role, including recruiting social workers to a role that was entirely focused on child protection and ensuring that it did not lead to burnout.

In its annual report, the panel referred to concerns that the organisational changes entailed by the reforms would be distracting, but defended its advocacy of multi-agency child protection teams.

“We have continued to see many reviews where there are fault lines in the way that the safeguarding system is designed, for example, with agencies working in silo, information not being brought together in a timely way, and assessments being undertaken in parallel.

“As a result, professionals do not always have a clear and full picture of what is happening in a child’s life and necessary decisions are not being taken at the right time. We think that these issues can be best tackled by establishing multi-agency child protection teams.”

Introducing specialist child protection social workers is posing workforce challenges for the councils testing the system.

Issues included retaining staff, maintaining safeguarding skills among other social workers and avoiding disruption to families as a result of the reform.

Leaders from Dorset, Lincolnshire and Wolverhampton councils relayed the messages in a session at this week’s National Children and Adult Services Conference (NCASC) on their experience as families first for children pathfinders.

Testing children’s social care reforms

The three – who will be joined on the programme by other councils next year – are testing four of the key planks of the government’s children’s social care reform plan, Stable Homes, Built on Love:

1. Setting up multi-disciplinary family help teams, through the merger of existing targeted early help and child in need services, to provide more effective and non-stigmatising support to families.
2. Appointing experienced and skilled social workers as lead child protection practitioners (LCPPs). They will hold all child protection cases, working in tandem with family help practitioners already involved with the family and supported by practitioners from other agencies – notably health and police – who are also particularly skilled in safeguarding.
3. Making greater use of family networks when families need help, through increased use of family group decision making and the provision of support packages to remove financial and practical barriers to networks providing this support.
4. Strengthening multi-agency safeguarding leadership, including through ensuring members of strategic partnerships are sufficiently senior to make decisions on behalf of their agency, and increasing the role of education.

Mixed response to lead practitioner role

The proposed lead child protection practitioner role, which the DfE adopted from the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, drew a mixed response from respondents to the consultation on the reforms.

Council leaders warned it could be difficult to recruit to the role and stressed the importance of all social workers having child protection expertise.

The latter point was raised by Wolverhampton director of children’s services (DCS) Alison Hinds at this week’s NCASC session.

Maintaining safeguarding skills

“How we ensure social workers remain skilled in that safeguarding area when they are not lead child protection practitioners is crucial for future management of risk,” she said.

Lincolnshire DCS Heather Sandy said level 1 social workers, who are in the early part of their career, were still holding child protection cases.

“We see it as a key part of their development,” she said.

Leaders also suggested there were challenges in retaining social workers who were just doing child protection work, rather than having a diverse caseload including children in need, as was the case outside the pathfinder areas.

Need to avoid burnout

Dorset’s corporate director for care and protection, Paul Dempsey, said it had capped LCPPs’ caseloads at 12 and given them more complex child in need cases, to provide a mix of work.

“We want to make it an attractive role and avoid burnout,” he added.

Dorset is also testing allowing lead practitioners to chair their own child protection conferences, rather than having an independent chair, as is currently required by Working Together to Safeguard Children.

This idea was proposed by the care review as a way of freeing up social work resource. However, the British Association of Social Workers said at the time that the proposal was a “massive concern” because it would be difficult for a case-holding practitioner to “objectively” chair a conference.

Warning over independence of conference chairs

These concerns were raised during this week’s session.

In a question to the panel, Haringey council director of children’s services Ann Graham said: “I do remember the tensions of working with the family to make change and then I put myself in the role of the chair – that could create a further tension in that relationship.

“The other thing in that relationship is, if the child protection lead is the conference chair, how do we avoid group think and tunnel vision because we know they can be problematic?”

Sandy said Lincolnshire would not be testing the idea as the authority did not see it as “a step in the positive direction”.

Dempsey said Dorset was testing it out in one of its localities, adding that the authority was “not sure that’s the greatest idea in the pathfinder programme”.

“While we’re testing it out, we will have one of our quality assurance professionals in that meeting to offer a bit of scrutiny and independence and also to make sure that parent voice is heard in that meeting,” he added.

Concerns over case handovers

Pathfinders were also wrestling with the impact on families of having a new social worker – the LCPP – enter their lives at the point of child protection when they had already been working with a family help lead practitioner.

Hinds said Wolverhampton had thought a lot about this issue.

“We are just thinking about how complicated it could be for families when there are in high levels of anxiety and stress, they could have a social worker who is their lead family help practitioner and we then introduce another social worker who is their child protection lead,” she added.

“We are really thinking about families’ experiences about what that will look like.”

Dempsey pointed to the fact that the family help lead practitioner was expected to stay with the family, adding: “We are trying to make all our handovers as warm as possible. The model expects the family help practitioner to stay with the family when the family moves into the child protection space, to try and avoid that handover.”

Non-social workers taking on child in need cases

Another controversial element of the reform is the DfE’s plan for non-social workers to hold child in need cases – though with social worker oversight – as lead practitioners within the new family help teams.

Both the British Association of Social Workers and Ofsted have raised concerns that this will increase risks to children because of the complexity of the needs of families involved in child in need cases.

Dempsey said Dorset was looking at the training needs of family help lead practitioners who were not social workers and said a key focus was how to oversee arrangements when the practitioner was employed outside the council.

The pathfinders are currently due to run until March 2025, with no certainty that the reforms will be implemented thereafter, which Sandy said was a concern.

“The biggest challenge is sustainability – disrupting teams, making change to families and not having guarantees of funding beyond the next 18 months is really challenging,” she added.

The number of annual child protection enquiries has hit a new high but the proportion of those finding abuse or neglect has continued to fall, official figures show.

Directors warned that the 3.5% hike in the number of section 47 enquiries, from 2021-22 to 2022-23, reflected the erosion of preventive services on the back of “a decade of austerity”.

At the same time, an academic specialising in the overemphasis of safeguarding risks said that the increasing number of section 47s that did not result in a child protection plan was causing “irreparable damage” to children and families.

The trends were laid bare in the Department for Education’s annual children in need census, published last week, which also revealed that social workers’ assessment caseloads hit a record high in 2022-23, as did the average amount of time they took.

While last year’s census showed increases in children’s social care caseloads across the board, in the wake of the pandemic, this year’s figures showed a mixed picture, with decreases in the numbers of referrals and children found to be in need.

Section 47 case numbers continue to rise

However, the number of section 47 enquiries rose significantly in 2022-23 on top of a 10% hike the previous year, and there were almost 100,000 more investigations during the year than a decade ago (2012-13).

But the proportion of enquiries resulting in an initial child protection conference (ICPC) – meaning abuse or neglect were substantiated – plummeted from 46.6% in 2012-13 to 33.9% in 2021-22, and fell again over the past year, to 33%.

There was a similar fall in the proportion of section 47s resulting in a child protection plan, which is drawn up following an ICPC (see box above).

These trends were criticised by the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, which described them as indicative of a system that was overly investigative and insufficiently supportive of families.

Some investigations ‘causing irreparable damage to children’

Dr Andy Bilson, emeritus professor of social work at the University of Central Lancashire, said they showed that “the targeting of investigations has dramatically worsened”.

Bilson, whose specialises in research into the overemphasis of risk in the child protection system, said: “This year alone more than 130,000 children and their families were put through an investigation being accused of significantly harming their children which did not lead to a child protection plan,” he said.

“Such investigations cause irreparable damage to children and their families.”

The Association of Directors of Children’s Services attributed the trends to an erosion of preventive services, driven by government spending cuts to councils in the 2010s and resulting in authorities encountering children when their needs had grown more complex.

‘Lack of preventive services driving section 47 numbers’

“This has undoubtedly impacted on our ability to meet need sooner within our communities, resulting in a significant rise in the number of section 47 enquiries over the same period when these children could potentially have been supported earlier were the resources available,” said Helen Lincoln, chair of the ADCS’s families, communities and young people policy committee.

She said this had been exacerbated by the pandemic and the fact that more families were experiencing hardship or crisis than previously.

“We need government to address the root causes of these issues and commit to a long-term plan for children, along with a funding settlement that commits more than the bare minimum and prioritises those most in need of support.”

The association’s calls for increased funding were echoed by the Local Government Association and NSPCC.

Children’s services across country ‘under-resourced’

“This new data shows a decline in the number of child protection plans being actioned in England despite an increase in assessments taking place,” said the NSPCC’s associate head of policy & public affairs, Joanna Barrett.

“Children’s services across the country are under-resourced and under-funded and this is more pronounced in areas of higher need, where assessments may be even less likely to lead to a child receiving support due to the lack of resources.”

“The government must offer consistent funding and resource across the country when they action their upcoming plans to implement more family support services. This will help ensure that all children receive the care they need at the right time.”

For the LGA, children and young people board chair Louise Gittins said the government needed to find more funding to help councils meet “this continually high demand” in next month’s autumn statement, which will set out ministers’ latest taxation and spending plans.

“Councils continue to innovate in order to reduce costs, but further funding is required in order to meet demand,” she added.

Family support and child protection reforms

The figures come with the government testing a new approach to family support and child protection in three areas through its families first for children pathfinders, an approach proposed by the care review in its final report last year.

This involves the merger of targeted early help and children in need provision into a new family help service, designed to improve support for families and make it less stigmatising. As part of this, non-social workers would be permitted to hold child in need cases, a move that has sparked concerns about increased risk from the British Association of Social Workers and Ofsted.

At the same time, specialist child protection lead practitioners would take responsibility for section 47 enquiries, in order to enhance the quality of investigations.

The three pathfinder authorities, and nine others also due to test the system, will each receive a share of £37m to put it into effect.

But both the LGA and NSPCC stressed the importance of funding being rolled out to all 153 authorities, in order to effectively improve family support.

Concerns over drop in findings of sexual abuse

The census also revealed ongoing falls in the number of child protection plans for which the initial category of abuse was either physical or sexual abuse.

In the light of a 15% drop in the number of plans for which sexual abuse was the initial category since 2019, the Centre of expertise on child sexual abuse (CSA Centre) voiced concerns about high numbers of victims going unnoticed and unsupported.

“We estimate that each year half a million children in England and Wales will experience some form of sexual abuse, clearly there remains a huge gap between the numbers of children being sexually abused and the identification of abuse recorded by children’s services,” said the CSA Centre’s assistant director, policy, Lisa McCrindle.

Last year’s final report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) identified systemic under-identification of CSA, leading it to recommend practitioners face a duty to report cases.

The government has vowed to bring in so-called mandatory reporting, though IICSA chair Alexis Jay has criticised ministers for not accepting its recommendations in full.

McCrindle said that one year on from the IICSA report, government, councils and other agencies needed to prioritise the issue.

“The children’s workforce must be equipped with the knowledge, skills and confidence on identifying and responding to concerns of child sexual abuse in all its forms,” she added. “Beyond this, we echo IICSA’s recommendation for a commitment to a regular prevalence survey exploring the true scale of child sexual abuse to inform better prevention and response.”

Three councils have been selected to test giving responsibility for child protection cases to specialist social workers over the next two years.

Dorset, Lincolnshire and Wolverhampton will also trial merging targeted early help with child in need teams within a new family help service, as part of the Department for Education (DfE’s) proposed children’s social care reforms.

The three authorities are the first group of an expected 12 “pathfinders” testing out the families first for children model set out in the DfE’s draft strategy, Stable Homes, Built on Love, issued in February.

Based on the proposals of the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, this would involve:

• Establishing family help services to provide families in need with multidisciplinary support designed to resolve the issues they face without the need for more intervention, reduce stigma and remove the bureaucracy of stepping cases up and down between targeted early help and child in need.
• Enabling practitioners other than social workers to hold child in need cases – as defined by section 17 of the Children Act 1989 – removing the prohibition on them doing so set by statutory safeguarding guidance Working Together to Safeguard Children.
• Having specialist child protection lead practitioners co-work cases with family help teams from the point a local authority initiates a child protection enquiry.

Concerns over safeguarding risks and retention

The reforms are controversial, with the British Association of Social Workers and Ofsted having raised concerns about the safeguarding risks arising from removing the requirement for social workers to hold child in need cases.

Meanwhile, both Ofsted and the Association of Directors of Children’s Services have voiced misgivings about the impact of the lead child protection practitioner role on social work retention, in the context of mounting vacancy rates in local authority children’s services.

In its response to Stable Homes, Built on Love, the ADCS said social workers had shared concerns about “the high stakes nature of such a role, particularly if a tragedy sadly occurs”.

“High end child protection work is hard to sustain over long periods of time, it is emotionally taxing and there are few guarantees it will result in practitioners staying in frontline practice,” it added.

The three pathfinder authorities are all rated good (Dorset and Wolverhampton) or outstanding (Lincolnshire) by Ofsted and all have social work vacancy rates below the national average of 20%, as of September 2022, with Dorset’s being 13.8%, Lincolnshire’s 15.6% and Wolverhampton’s 17.6%.

In relation to the number of child protection plans per 10,000 children, as of March 2022, Lincolnshire’s (25.6) was well below the national average of 42.1, Wolverhampton’s was around the England-wide figure (42.3) and Dorset’s was above it (47.7).

Family network pilots

The DfE has also selected seven councils to pilot the use of so-called family network support packages to enable wider family members to step in to prevent children entering the care system when there are risks to them at home. This was also proposed by the care review.

Brighton and Hove, Sunderland, Gateshead and Telford and Wrekin will start their family network pilots this month (July), and Staffordshire, Hartlepool and Hammersmith and Fulham will do so in spring 2024.

The news comes with a recent evaluation having found that using family group conferences (FGCs) – a form of family network decision making – reduced the risk of children going into care 12 months after families entered pre-proceedings.

Meanwhile, councils would be encouraged to refer families to FGCs from early help onwards, under proposed changes to Working Together, which are currently out to consultation.

The 12 families first for children pathfinders and seven family network pilots will receive £45m in funding overall up to March 2025, with £7.8m of this allocated to the latter.

ADCS president John Pearce said the announcement was a “positive step”, but said it was imperative for the learning from the pilots and pathfinders to be shared with the rest of the sector as quickly as possible.

“The earlier we work with, and provide support to, vulnerable children and families to help them overcome the issues they face, and to stay together safely where possible the less impact these challenges will have on their lives but also on society,” said Pearce. “While the investment announced today is welcome, we continue to need a long-term equitable funding solution for children’s services so that all children and families can thrive, wherever they live.”

DfE still looking for regions to test care co-operatives

The department is still looking for two regions to test its plan to regionalise the commissioning of care placements within so-called regional care co-operatives, which would be collectives of local authorities.

RCCs are designed to overcome the challenge of individual councils being too small – and having too few children – to be able to meaningfully shape the services providers offer and ensure that they meet need and are value for money.

The DfE has said that, by operating at much greater scale than councils, RCCs would be much better able to forecast need, and commission sufficient placements, in the right places, to meet it.

It would also be much easier to share learning, good practice and information about the cost and quality of providers between 20 RCCs, compared with 153 councils, improving the quality of commissioning.

However, the ADCS said last month that, while there were “varying degrees of interest in taking up a RCC pathfinder opportunity”, at present, “no region seems to be interested in adopting the approach as outlined by DfE”.

In a separate paper, the association voiced “significant reservations” about the proposal’s capacity to address the challenge of there being insufficient placements of the right kind and quality for children in care.

The association said creating RCCs would be “costly and time consuming” and “may result in a mass exist of providers”, such was the current fragility of the care placements market.

The DfE said the RCC pathfinders would “enable a test and learn approach to find the most effective way of implementing this reform, doing so in conjunction with local government and the children’s social care sector”.