Children's social care: The way forward

Over recent years a trend of rapid increase of the use of section 47 of the 1989 Children and Young Person Act has led to one in every 16 children in England being investigated before the age of five.

Transformational change is needed, and to transform the system we advocate the need to nurture and test out a range of strategies which shift the power from government and public services to parents, children and communities.

The Review of Children’s Social Care published in May focuses strongly on the need for fundamental shifts in children’s social care responses to enable ‘responsive, respectful, and effective support’. It will be vital that making these aspirations reality is informed by parents and children with lived experience of the system. The report Children’s Social Care: The Way Forward published in January 2022 offers rich reflections on key areas and suggestions for change from five highly experienced and expert organisations (Parent Families and Allies Network; Love Barrow Families; New Beginnings; Parent and Carer Alliance; and Southwark Family Council and Parent to Parent Peer Advocacy) working with parents involved in different aspects of children’s social care.

The way forward

We recognise the need for a cultural shift to genuinely fostering partnership and the participation of parents, families and communities. Our organisations need to move from a culture of risk, suspicion and blame to helping families and communities to find their own solutions to ensuring wellbeing and safety of children.  We need genuinely family-focused guidance to replace Working Together to Safeguard Children, which places a singular focus on risk of harm whether discussing early help, children in need or child protection investigations.

We would like parental advocacy, delivered by parents with lived experience, to be available to all parents engaged with children’s social care. This has been shown to change working cultures, build bridges and increase the focus and scope of support for children and their families. A range of studies mainly from the US show how advocacy improves outcomes for children in areas including: child protection conferences; in care proceedings when advocates work alongside legal representatives; as part of substance use services;  and when parents with lived experience become colleagues in child welfare agencies.

We believe that social work is most effective when it is relationship-based, proportionate and humane. For this to be possible, practitioners need to have the time to work directly with families and communities. This requires a well-supported workforce with sufficient time to build and maintain relationships of trust. This will require attention to the issues driving acute recruitment and retention issues in children’s social care; sufficient administrative support to allow workers more time to work directly with families, and workforce development that situates individual families’ issues in an understanding of context and root causes.

Rather than parents seeking help and experiencing suspicion and investigation, children in need and early help guidance should focus on the parents’ and child’s concerns and needs, and the facilitation of family group conferences to develop family led and co-produced plans and their implementation. Where there is a child protection investigation families should be treated with dignity, and assessment, and planning for the child and family’s needs should be a core part of the process.

Our report recommends the development of a social model for domestic abuse, in which practice pays careful attention to the individual stories of pain and trauma within the wider contexts of societal inequality and disadvantage. Where support and help are offered in partnership and methods, such as motivational interviewing, are used to genuinely share control, empower and work together.

In the context of family court proceedings parents in our network express the view that defence lawyers do not do enough to challenge local authority positions effectively. We argue the need for a panel of lawyers who demonstrate their independence by not taking on cases on behalf of the local authority and actively challenging the local authority’s case. In some parts of the US law firms employ social workers and parent advocates who are involved in case planning and ensure parents understand the process and that commitments are feasible for parents and children to undertake. Research shows this can reduce the numbers of children in care with no increase in risk of maltreatment to children and considerable savings to overall expenditure. Legal teams including both parent and child advocates might be funded as an alternative to the CAFCASS role and might better protect the rights of children.

Finally, adoption should genuinely be a last resort and permanence should in most cases be open. Our reports proposes: ‘Where permanent alternative care is needed, it should be legally possible to use special guardianship for children in care. This would leave open a flexible approach to contact and the possibility of changing levels and approaches to parental and wider family involvement’.

We provide examples of positive and supportive work with children, families and communities in our report. This includes the organisations that contributed to the consultation and includes:

• Love Barrow Together which provides support for the whole family joining up child and adult mental health and social care;
• New Beginnings working holistically with families providing a supportive community for parents involved in children’s social care.
• The Parent and Carer Alliance which creates a community for families with children with additional needs.
• In Southwark the Family Council provides feedback and advice on current and future services
• Parent to Parent Peer Advocacy provides parent advocacy supporting parents at child protection conferences.

Other examples of positive developments include Leeds’s focus on providing timely and focused support and Camden’s creative use of family group conferences and developing parent advocacy.

We would love you to read our report and to join us to make our desire for change a reality.