Children’s social care is set to be re-vamped in England as it has been awarded £200m in funding over two years, however, social care experts have criticised that more needs to be done.
Titled Stable Homes, Built on Love Plan, the new government strategy, launched today, pledges children taken into care in England will be placed close to their family and friends rather than hundreds of miles away.
Additionally, the plan promises to provide earlier help for families in crisis, strengthen local protection teams and tackle chronic staff shortages of children’s social workers.
The project has come in response to the government-commissioned MacAlister review of children’s social care published last year, which concluded that urgent changes were needed to transform a financially unsustainable system spiralling out of control.
The MacAlister review recommended a five-year, £2.6bn plan to tackle the crisis the government had failed to get a grip on and said if nothing changed 100,000 children would end up in care within a decade, up from 80,000 that are in care at the moment.
Currently so many children have been taken into care due to council budget cuts which have forced local authorities to ‘reduce preventative services to focus on intervention in crisis situations, alongside facing a lack of alternative solutions, such as foster care’, according to new research from the County Councils Network.
The Minister for Children, Families and Wellbeing, Claire Coutinho, said: ‘Children in care deserve the same love and stability as everyone else.
‘Yet we’ve seen from the two tragic murders of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson that more needs to be done to protect our most vulnerable children.’
Annie Hudson, Chair of the national Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, said what happened to Star Hobson and Arthur Labinjo-Hughes spotlighted the dire need to reinforce the ;importance of reform’ across the children’s social care system.
Ms Hudson claimed she welcomed the new government plans calling it ‘very broad in scope’ and ‘bold in its intentions and ambitions’.
To address the issue of children living in abusive homes, the government have said up to 12 local authorities will test a new ‘family help’ service based in schools. The system will be comprised of social workers, mental health practitioners and domestic abuse workers.
However, concerns have been cast that this plan is only being made available in select locations rather than being rolled out immediately.
Additionally, care organisations have criticised the government’s inability to establish concrete evidence on how to improve help to support children in abusive households.
Jo Casebourne, Chief Executive of What Works for Early Intervention and Children’s Social Care said: ‘The implementation plan does not address the fact that there is limited evidence on what is likely to be most effective in critical areas such as improving outcomes for children in families where there is domestic abuse, neglect, or parental substance misuse.
‘Until we tackle this and identify and develop strong intervention models, the aspiration to make high quality help available to families who is need it is likely to elude us.’
Photo by Vitolda Klein and Jordan Whitt