We will now begin the public evidence session of the Education Committee’s inquiry on children’s social care. Welcome to our session this morning. I will first invite members to put on record any interests that they would like to declare in relation to our evidence session this morning. I will start with two items that I wish to put on the record. The first is that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association. The second is that one of our witnesses, Matthew Horne, used to work with my husband a very long time ago in the civil service, so I will put that on the record as well. Are there any other interests from members of the Committee this morning?

I am a local councillor still.

That is relevant. Thank you, Manuela. Before we get going—and I will invite our witnesses to introduce themselves in a moment—I want to say that we are reopening the inquiry on children’s social care that the previous Select Committee had started before the general election. We are doing so in the context of a very distressing high-profile case, the murder of Sara Sharif, which is in the courts at the moment. We are under the sub judice rule in this session because the sentencing on that case is taking place today. The case has, therefore, not completely finished in the courts. That means that we cannot discuss any aspects of the detail of the case. As a Committee, we are acutely aware of the significance of this case and other very distressing child protection cases and the need for the social care system to respond in a preventative way to stop such tragedies happening again in the future. We will be taking an interest in child protection as part of this inquiry in future evidence sessions. We may in our questioning touch on aspects of the wider implications of this case today, but I ask members and witnesses to refrain please from discussing any aspects of the detail. I will now ask our witnesses to introduce themselves.

My name is James Bury. I am head of policy, research and development at CoramBAAF. CoramBAAF is the UK’s leading membership organisation for professionals working in fostering, adoption and kinship care. Ninety-four per cent of local authorities are our members, as well as independent fostering providers.

My name is Mark Kerr. I am the chief executive officer of the Children’s Homes Association. We are the membership body for children’s homes in England and Wales, representing local authorities, not-for-profits and for-profit providers.

I am Councillor Arooj Shah, leader of Oldham Council and chair of the Children & Young People Board at the Local Government Association.

I am Matthew Horne. I am chief executive of Innovation Unit. We are a not-for-profit and in recent years have worked on the children’s social care innovation programme and the strengthening families, protecting children programme. My team is currently working on the families first for children pathfinder programme for the Department for Education.

Thank you. I will start with our first question. Can you set out the current levels of demand for children’s social care and whether the current levels of provision are available to meet the need? I will start with Councillor Shah.

I think it is well rehearsed that there has been a huge funding pressure in children’s social care for local authorities. The LGA has found £2.8 billion in additional pressures over the last five years, which has made it very difficult to provide services in the way that we would have liked to. That is due to rising costs and needs. It has largely gone into child protection and children in care services, which is a situation that every local authority in the country has found themselves in, as opposed to where we would have liked it to be, which is early intervention, family work and preventative work. We know that when you invest in those areas, you have stability in workforce and you also have the ability to provide support for those who are most vulnerable in our communities, and that has not been the case. We welcome the recent additional funding into children and social care that the Government have made but there are still huge concerns, issues and pressures that we have to address to ensure that we are able to provide the support that our communities need.

I agree with those remarks. There is an imbalance in the system in that we have more spending at the back end of the system on children in care rather than on early intervention. Some of the challenges that we see are in fostering. There is a crisis in fostering at the moment in the number of foster carers leaving the profession without being able to recruit sufficient foster carers to replace them. That is a challenge. That will continue to be the case while we have these high numbers of children in care, until we turn that around. There are some positive developments in kinship care and the kinship strategy has been very welcome. We will wait to see how those developments improve things and help to keep families together. It is also important to not forget adoption in this. Adoption accounts for around 3,000 children per year—there are 3,000 adoption orders made per year. There can be a hugely important permanence outcome where that is the right choice for children. However, fundamentally, there are real challenges with the way the system is balanced.

I think that there is consensus on the challenges that local authorities are facing on their budgets. There may be some debate in what the causal factors are of that and whether budgets were sufficient in the first place and wider pressures around numbers in care. Children have changed as well. The sector is currently responding to changing profiles of need. We have a lot of children and young people at the extreme end of acute high risk and high need. The research is starting to demonstrate to us that something happened to children through covid and lockdowns and that has created additional pressures. There are challenges in whether we have the right children in the right placements. As indicated here, we have a massive problem with fostering. I am the first to acknowledge that we have children in children’s homes who could be better placed in foster care. Equally, with the system at the higher end, the Children’s Commissioner report highlighted that there are about 750 children still in unlawful placements because we cannot create the placements for them in the regulated children’s homes sector. That is one of the barriers. It is about how we get the children with most need, the acute high-intervention residential, into that provision while being able to get children into foster care. Maybe we have to look at the way that the whole system is working. We are very much focused on how the residential sector can evolve to keep families together in a more dynamic interventionist way, with short-term interventions. Our principle is that children should have the opportunity to live in family life, and residential is there to try to help to achieve that.

In the last 10 years we have seen big increases in child poverty, which have had a big effect on the children’s social care system, a big increase in demand, increases in extra-familial harm, increases in exploitation experienced by young people and increased recognition from the system. All those things have driven demand. At the same time, we have seen increased spend in children’s social care—but, as colleagues have said, mainly in child protection and for looked-after children, and cuts in early help services at a local level. Cutting the preventative spend has seen more than an increase at the higher-cost end.

The Government set out proposals for some increased spending on social care in the autumn Budget, including an additional £1.3 billion for local authorities and £250 million to pilot new approaches. What impact will this have in the context that you have all just described?

I think it will make a difference. The question is whether it will make enough of a difference. Trying to turn around some of the cuts that took place in the 2010s and then that spending on late intervention will take some time. The additional spending is welcome, but I don’t know whether it will be enough and sustained enough to make that transformation. We have talked about child poverty. Child poverty has a massive impact on children and a massive impact on families. There are other factors that impact children, such as the special educational needs system and the support for children and the support in education. Wider support is needed for children that is outside of just children’s social care. It is about how they are supported, including children with neurodiversity and things like that, to make sure that their needs are met. It does go some way, but to really transform children’s services it will need more money over a longer term.

I completely agree with that. We welcome it. It is fantastic. I think the way the Government are building on the recent progress following the independent review of children’s social care means that it will add value—most certainly, it will definitely add value. We are pleased because, aside from the money, the Government are now talking about the ongoing focus on the early help stuff, all the early intervention and prevention stuff. Making sure that children get the right care in the right place at the right time will be significant. For example, in Oldham I have a £13 million in-year pressure already this year. While that money will help, there are nuances and we are finding that there are huge pressures. We have mental health issues not only in our children and young people, but in their families and their parents too. We have the cost of living stuff. We have the pressure on the health service. It is such a complex picture at the moment. We welcome the money, but I think it will take a hell of a lot of time and a lot more significant investment to have that change. Then we have the significant challenges within the workforce as well. To recruit social workers to provide that stability and care is a huge challenge itself. There are huge campaigns across the country. In Greater Manchester we have had to introduce a cap because we know that agency workers were getting paid a lot more than local authorities were offering, which meant that there was a competitive nature there. We were not able to provide stability in the workforce, which meant that vulnerable children who have complex needs were having sometimes five, six or seven social workers changing. That does not provide support or stability for them and their families. There are huge issues and challenges, but obviously we are working in the right direction and we really welcome and value that.

The sector has broadly welcomed the additional money. It is a lot of money, but it is nowhere near sufficient. One of the things that was very welcome was the reintroduction of a ringfence for that funding to ensure that it is spent on preventative services. However, there is a real risk that, as central Government pour more money in using a ringfence, other money drains out of the system locally as it is reallocated by councils to other spending pressures. In the absence of any statutory duty for early help, it is very hard for local leaders to protect that funding to deliver preventative services for families.

All the measures are welcome, and it has been quite a while coming in terms of the tangibles. Obviously, we will see the Bill later, but funding commitments are always welcome. However, I echo that the numbers underestimate the scale of the challenge. We will have a period where local authorities will have to have double spending: preventative measures need to be introduced at the same time as children and young people are already on the care continuum. It is unfortunate that we are looking at three to five years, but it is a welcome start to that journey.

Councillor Shah, in written evidence submitted earlier this year, the LGA highlighted the risk of councils issuing section 114 notices in this year. Has that risk been averted by this funding?

Definitely not. Most of us are at the brink of falling off the cliff edge. We are obviously trying as much as we can. I know that I keep repeating this in every session I do, but I have to say that we welcome that we have a Government that are now talking to the sector, which is important. It at least provides us the reassurance and comfort that somebody is listening, because we have been knocking on closed doors and it has been very difficult. What you do not expect when you go back to your communities is for our communities to have to figure out local government finance. That is not their job. They expect a service from us as a public service and we should be able to provide that, but it has been very difficult. However, I do not think it is anywhere near, even now, to help and support councils to get over this. It will take a lot and a longer mid-term and long-term investment to make sure that it is right. What needs to change underneath it all is the power and the tools for local authorities to be able to influence those areas as well. There is a lot to do in so many different aspects.

Thank you all for coming in this morning and thanks for your answers so far. The previous Education Committee heard a great deal of evidence about the number of children being placed outside of their areas. What measures should be put in place to reduce the number of out-of-area placements? I will start with Dr Kerr, since he has given evidence to this Committee before.

I will be the first to acknowledge that there is a dislocate with where homes are needed. It is often simplified that homes are where property is cheaper, but it is genuinely a lot more complex than that. We have a concentration in the north-west, with about 26% or 27% of the homes up there. Equally, the north-west has a lot of children in care. If you look at where the children are often being placed out of their authorities, it may be from Liverpool to Manchester or Liverpool to Bolton. There is a lot of misunderstanding with that, but we need to address the barriers to opening up more specialist provision. We need to do that very carefully because we are not convinced—coming back to my previous answer—about how many children should potentially be in foster care, how many children should potentially be back at home and how many more children’s homes we have. We know that we need children’s homes that are able to keep safe some of the most high-need and high-risk children in society. They are difficult, but we have some tangible barriers; we think the policy paper has alluded to changes on tangibles and planning permission. Planning consent creates disproportion in where children’s homes are registered. Some local authorities will give what we call a certificate of lawfulness. We have about four or five examples this year. Other local authorities make you go through the full planning cycle, which can take up to 18 months. We need to look at recruitment as well. Where are you able to recruit people from? There are a lot of factors there, but we must pursue it with vigour. The two game-changer measures are the changes to location assessment with the Ofsted registration and changes to planning permission. What we would like to see is that providers that have evidenced an ability and competence to meet the needs of high-need, high-risk children can be registered quicker. There should be an assumption of planning consent or certificate of lawfulness being given. Having the location assessments for your Ofsted registration being endorsed by that local authority puts a safety mechanism that we are getting the right homes in the right places. There is huge opportunity in the Bill, but we need to see the detail and the subsequent policy papers.

Absolutely and, of course, we will see the details soon. I will open it up to anyone else now who wants to contribute to this question.

I would like to make a couple of points. One is around fostering. I made the point about the crisis in fostering and the challenges in recruitment and retention in foster care. One of the challenges is local authorities having enough in-house foster carers themselves. At the moment the balance is almost at parity, with about 45% of foster carers with independent fostering agencies and about 55% with local authorities. If we want to have children placed close to home, we probably need more local authority foster placements. Having said that, I think you also just generally need more foster carers so that there is more choice. Ultimately, what is happening is that in a crisis there is not any in-house provision. You will call up an independent fostering agency and find whoever is available, and that might not be nearby. Those are some of the sad circumstances around how placements can happen in an emergency. There is another angle as well on how the health needs of children are met when they are out of placement. It is important that the guidance is very clear about who should be delivering things in health. If you are placed out of area, for universal services, that should be whatever is in that area, but secondary things like CAMHS that should be commissioned by the ICB it is very bureaucratic, it is very difficult to achieve and it does not work. That is something that this Committee could make recommendations about, looking at whether there could be some national commissioning around health, because the situation does not work for children.

One of the big dysfunctionalities in the market is that it is highly unmanaged. There is a lot of spot purchasing of beds, often late on a Friday evening, with social workers ringing around dozens and dozens of providers to find any bed in an emergency. In effect, the local authority is a purchaser in distress and that is a terrible situation to make long-term decisions about the care and safety of young people. We need to create a much more managed market where there is much stronger local commissioning. We need to move away from spot purchasing of beds. We need to use planning to ensure that local places are for local children and that local authorities use their planning powers to ensure that that is there. We need to move away from buying beds to buying outcomes for children, in both the short and long term, and seeing children’s homes beds as part of a wider system that includes foster beds, kinship care and reunification with birth families. That means that it needs to be local. It would be possible to commission children’s homes beds alongside other placements if you had this long-term, managed, outcome-based approach.

I feel very strongly about James’s final point on the health system. If you have a young person who has significant mental health needs and needs an inpatient bed, CAMHS can easily defer responsibility. Often there is a case where they will turn around and say, “There is no diagnosable need for this young person,” and just defer the responsibility, which leaves you in the situation that Matthew alluded to, where you are ringing up on a Thursday or Friday evening and trying to get a place for this young person. As local authorities, we cannot defer responsibility. We are corporate parents. They are our young people. I think that there is something about the system and a greater call and scrutiny on the responsibilities of the health service in this because they sometimes escape that responsibility. That should be looked at through the Select Committee if possible.

I want to ask about foster care. I should probably declare an interest in that I grew up in foster care, so I am particularly interested in this. James, you have called for a foster care strategy to sit alongside the adoption and kinship care strategies. I will begin with you, but I am interested in others too. In your view, what should that strategy focus on? There were some recommendations as part of stable homes, built on love. How should this go beyond that?

I think that things have moved on. We have had stable homes, built on love and we have had the more recent policy paper from the Government. The Government are going down a path towards more regionalisation to try to build capacity with local authorities and to help them to forecast for the future. We will see how that works in practice. It is welcome, because ultimately the local authorities need the help. They need to take a longer view than they have done and to get away from some of the spot purchasing that we have talked about. The national fostering strategy is less about a framework and the structure around fostering, and more about practice and how we support foster carers better. Foster carers are struggling with how allegations are handled when they are made against foster carers. It is right that allegations are looked into and that children’s needs are put first, but the majority are not found to be substantiated. The whole process can be extremely distressing for foster carers, their families and their own children. Delegated authority, how foster carers can make decisions about children in their care, should be looked at. The national minimum standards should be reviewed. They have not been reviewed since 2011. There is an opportunity to have harmonisation of fees and allowances and to try to sort that out for foster carers. There is dissatisfaction among carers when they compare what they are paid across borders. There is something about supporting the workforce. There is too much churn in the children’s social care workforce, which means that children in care have changes in social worker. We are also seeing that in supervising social workers who support foster carers. They need support as well. I see it as very much a practice support, but it would also match the kinship and adoption strategies.

Some of the issues there you have mentioned, particularly pay and support, are also coming through in discussions about kinship care, so perhaps there is scope to look at it together. Thank you. There were some very good details there.

For me, it is about recognising that the children who are being cared for are on a continuum. We have foster care and we have kinship and there will be the right place on that continuum for a child at any point in time. There are valid points there around standardisation of foster carer rates, but the same conversations are also happening in residential. There can be financial incentives for people to move fostering agencies—a golden handshake shall we say—but there are equally massive disparities now in the residential salaries. These are public services at the end of the day. They may be outsourced, and we need to recognise that the sector has evolved and the Government policies in some areas have not kept abreast of that. Do we need standardised pay policies across foster care and across residential? It was mooted at a roundtable just last week about people moving around children’s homes—managers and so on. Registered manager salaries have gone up by about 25% or 30% in the last couple of years based on supply and demand. How can we remove that financial incentive to move around? Should we be looking at children’s social care as a public service sector similar to any other and introduce pay banding?

I have one follow-up question on the latest DFE paper, which does mention—I think James said this—the move towards more regional recruitment hubs. What impact is that likely to have? Is that a silver bullet?

I think it could potentially have a very useful impact. Local authorities operate at a time where they are focusing on child protection, children in their care, and meeting this need, and this would allow them an opportunity at a regional level to take a step back and look at their sufficiency. The regional care co-operatives that have been set up in Manchester and in the south-east have some additional funding, so they may be able to put some provision in place. It is matched with funding and they may be able to improve their sufficiency. I suppose if more regional care co-operatives are rolled out across the country, it will be important that they are funded. There is a challenge in that there is a limited pool of people to become foster carers. Trying to expand that is a challenge. You could have a national recruitment campaign, which could try to increase that pool. However, it will remain to be seen. There is something to be done in trying to prevent local authorities from competing with other local authorities and with independent fostering agencies and to work more collaboratively, which could make for better decision making and planning for children in care.

Briefly on that, do you think there is an issue that the national fostering recruitment that has been devolved to regional levels has not sufficiently involved independent fostering agencies as part of a collaborative partnership to ensure that we are reaching as many foster carers as possible?

When you speak to independent fostering agencies, it is challenging because ultimately it can feel like competition between local authorities and independent fostering agencies. Even though you are providing a service to those local authorities, ultimately you are fishing in the same pool for the same people. Having said that, there is a lot to be learnt from independent fostering agencies. I think that 96% are rated outstanding or good. They do very good work and they focus on one thing, which is recruitment and retention of foster carers and providing good placements. I also think that independent fostering agencies could learn from local authorities. There is an opportunity there and I do not think we have missed it totally yet. We have local authorities and IFAs in our membership and there is an opportunity to learn. We have been working on the Fosterlink project about improving recruitment and approval processes with the Department for Education and Mott McDonald. Again, there is learning from that that is relevant across the board, so I think there is an opportunity.

I will come in on that. I have spent many years sitting on fostering panels, and I still have a large set of colleagues in the fostering sector. I am nervous about regionalisation being held up as the solution in so many different areas. Results have been mixed, particularly around regional commissioning. I know that one or two foster agencies have done exceptionally well with their growth and satisfaction with their carers. Their marketing or recruitment comes from word of mouth. In certain areas, there is that real need for a local approach when you are looking to find local people. On the one hand we are saying we want to try to keep children in their local communities, but on the other hand we are saying a regional approach would be the solution. I do not know if we can reconcile those. While there are some huge opportunities—and we are working on both the regional care co-operatives with the local authorities—for creating provision for high-need, high-risk cohorts, there are not many of them, but there is a regional approach there. However, for everyday children’s social care, foster placements and local children’s homes, I think it needs to stay with local authorities for local accountability and to have that community around them.

Focusing on kinship care and arrangements, James, the Department for Education’s policy paper set out a number of measures to support kinship carers, including trialling a kinship allowance and appointing a national kinship care ambassador. What are your views on these measures? Are any further measures needed?

The kinship strategy was welcome. It is the first ever national kinship strategy and, for a lot of kinship carers and children in kinship care arrangements, just to feel seen and recognised by the Government was very important. It is positive that this Government have taken forward and continued some of the work that was started under the previous Government. The proposals around family group decision making, having opportunities for family group decision making or family network meetings at the point where a child is potentially on the edge of care, so that the family can make decisions, is important. It is not necessarily new—that is a practice that has happened in the past, so I suppose it is standardising that, making sure that the guidance and support for social workers delivering that works and works for the family. The national kinship ambassador, Jahnine Davis, is a great appointment. There are racial disparities in kinship care. Black and ethnic minority children are over-represented in kinship care, but they are over-represented in areas where there is less support. For example, you are less likely to be under a special guardianship order where there is more support or less likely to be in a kinship foster care arrangement if you are a black or minority ethnic child. There is room for improvement. We have what my colleague calls a square peg in a round hole: we have a growing cohort of kinship foster carers, which makes up nearly a quarter of foster carers now, being fitted into a framework that was designed for unrelated foster carers. They are doing that largely because the children get more support as a child in care, and the foster carers get more support and some financial support as they are paid at the level of foster carers. They do not necessarily fit very well into that framework, and we are trying to squeeze the two together. The Law Commission will be looking at that next year and I think it would be something to try to unpick and unravel because it does not quite work. You have fostering panels looking at kinship carers and how that feels for kinship carers does not quite work. There is more work to be done, but it has been good work so far.

I agree, and I entirely welcome all the work and the strategy around kinship carers. I think that works well. We discuss a lot about the kinship carer arrangements for children and families who are in formal kinship arrangements, but there is a significant proportion of people who are in informal kinship arrangements, like extended family or whatever. There needs to be more conversation around how we can support them as well. They tend to be from racially minoritised communities, because it is just the natural way of how people do things. The support is not there for them in the same way, and we need to bring the informal arrangements with kinship carers into that strategy.

You get a perverse situation whereby the families who potentially need the most amount of support get the arrangement with the least amount of support because they do not quite meet the level to qualify as a foster carer. There are too many concerns around them to get them to meet regulations, so the child might be put under a child arrangement order or in a private fostering arrangement because that is the only way they can make it work, and then they have less support.

I was talking recently with colleagues in North Yorkshire Council on this question of kinship care and family networks. It is easy for the Government to try to legislate around structures and processes, but probably what is more important is a stronger focus on practice and how the whole workforce works, particularly with birth families and their extended family and kinship networks. North Yorkshire’s use of family finding and family seeing as part of its safeguarding practice is very strong. It would argue that this whole approach to working with kinship networks needs to run all the way through all of its social work practice, from early help onwards. Although the evidence from family group conferencing and family group decision making is strong, and the work of the Family Rights Group on family group conferencing sets the gold standard, it is more than just mandating certain structures at certain points in the legal process. We need to see a change in practice throughout the whole of the safeguarding system.

I want to move on and ask James a question about adoption. The previous Government launched their national adoption strategy in 2021. What impact do you think that had on adoption provision and what measures would you like to see from the new Government to build on it?

The national adoption strategy is now coming up to about four years on. There are some real challenges around adoption that are not necessarily related to practice. It is to do with demographics and systemic challenges in, say, the cost of living and where we can recruit adopters from. I think that it is potentially worth reviewing the implementation of the national adoption strategy now that we are four years on to look at areas where we could improve. There are still significant challenges in finding adopters and finding homes for children who are the hardest to place. Those tend to be children who are older than the age of five, children with disabilities and children from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. That was the case in 2021 and in the 2010s, and we have not managed to resolve that. Going back and having a look at that again in detail and coming up with some tangible actions would be helpful. CoramBAAF is part of Coram. Coram used to run the national adoption register, which was closed down in 2018. I think that Coram would argue that reopening the national adoption register, which would encourage matching nationally, would help in that space. Link Maker is already there, so you would have to work out how it would fit alongside that. Those are some things. There is also something about the workforce. Regional adoption agencies are now the main delivery model for adoption. We are losing practice in local authorities around adoption so, if we want to improve adoption practice, we need to bring that adoption expertise back into local authorities in some way as well. We have lost some of that expertise. They have gone to the regional adoption agencies, so we are losing that pathway through. I think that is important. Finally, there is something important about access to records. This is for later on, but we need to review the regulations that are in place around access to records, particularly for those children who were adopted after 2005, the post-commencement children, because the regulations do not work when we have looked at them in detail. The other thing is that we need to update the regulations and the guidance. The regulations were written in 2005 and the guidance in 2013. The regulations do not mention regional adoption agencies at all, and the adoption regulations are not written with the existence of looked-after children’s health assessments as part of them either. A lot of updating could be done as well.

Do you think that there is enough support offered to adoptive families post adoption, or is that geographically varied?

That is one of the significant challenges in recruiting adopters. It is difficult anyway, and I agree that a lot of it has to do with the cost of living, but a lot of it has to do with access to support. As a result, you have young people waiting a long time to meet their new families, and it is because we have to be able to give adopters the confidence that they will receive ongoing support at any point in that child’s life. We are not able to do that now. If we are able to provide that support, I think the recruitment of adopters will become easier. It is because we cannot offer access to long-term support and that is something that we should be able to say with confidence to them.

There is modernisation of and increasing openness in adoption that has been put forward in the Public Law Working Group. I think it is welcome that there is likely to be more contact between a child and the birth parents and for that to be presumed as normal in adoption, where it is appropriate for the child and in their best interest. There will need to be training for social workers and support for adopters on how to do that. There will also need to be support for birth parents on how to do that. There is currently not enough support for birth parents, who often have experienced huge amounts of trauma and loss in the process.

I think there needs to be a flexible model of care that should be available to people. With this whole reference to residential care being the last resort, you often find that lots of people, especially young people, because of the experiences they have had with their own families, do not want to live in a family setting any more. The residential care element of it provides them with the reassurance and comfort that they need. There has to be some flexibility around that. The current model offers limited support, especially to families through significant crises, with binary options: either you are in care, or you are out of care. Having a more flexible model would then provide particular support for teenagers especially—that is where I see it a lot. It provides the important breathing space they need to be able to live their lives in a fulfilled way. We are seeing it a lot with unaccompanied asylum seeker children, where there has been trauma; you are then trying to place them with families and the families are not equipped with the right support for them, which means that we are adding to the trauma. We have found that where we have been able to provide them with residential care support, which is what they want, we are breaking down the difficult barriers of behaviour and stuff like that. A flexible approach in the model should be something that we are more comfortable in approaching.

It is a phrase that has been around for a long time. I did my PhD in this space, and we can go back to the Curtis committee review in the late 1940s about the foster versus residential debate. Over the years some of it is ideological, some of it is based on cost, but the evidence is unequivocal: front-loading residential for some children and young people can give them a much better journey through care. Back to the local authority budget situation, however, the reality is that there is a significant cost difference between the two. While even on the surface it may be clear that a child should be starting in a much higher-need care setting, the financial decision making is driving what local authorities have to do. That is understandable, but it is recognising that we cannot look at them in silos. Looking at the health journey, for example, children’s social care seems to be perceived as operating in a bubble away from the rest of health and social care. If we look at an individual’s journey through a hospital, children’s residential is at the acute end. Some of these children are potentially walking, talking serious case reviews. The level of risk is huge for these kids. Often it is expensive, but what we ideally want is a child to start in that acute high-need provision, move down the continuum in a controlled way and then hopefully have a long-lasting placement. Permanency has been lost a lot. If you have been around the sector for a long time, we have lost the concept of permanency and the placement and outcome that we want for this child. It may be a child who is at the acute end in a very high-need, restrictive setting, but we still want the outcome for them to be in a family environment. Those journeys are not really thought about enough at the moment.

I am greatly influenced by the “no wrong door” innovation in children’s homes that was set up in North Yorkshire and is now operating in a number of local authorities. Following on from what Mark said, the goal there for their children’s homes is to ensure that all young people achieve permanency in a family setting. That could be a foster setting, kinship care or, indeed, reunification with the birth family. In that sense, a children’s home should never be a last resort. It should never be a destination. It should only be a stepping stone to permanency in a family setting because that really is the only way in which you can deliver the longer-term outcomes that we want, which is preparation for adulthood, preparation for parenthood and living in a normal family setting. A lot of young people will say that they prefer to live in a children’s home, but that is largely because we have treated them so badly in their preceding experiences of the system. As long as we focus on what the big long-term outcomes are, children’s homes should be a stepping stone towards permanency in a family setting.

A lot of it is around the language at the moment. It has become extremely toxic. There has been a theme of figures and statistics being mispresented, which we do have to challenge; for example, not recognising that the residential care sector is a very diverse sector. The first decision I took as CEO when I went from deputy in April, to change our membership criteria. You can no longer be a member of the Children’s Homes Association if you are based in a tax haven or receive funding from tax havens, and there is an indication that the Government may be exploring that lead. We have a sector that has evolved over 30-plus years and to improve it will take a concerted effort. It also needs respect. While there is a level of toxicity of language and misrepresentation in Parliament—the CMA, for example, only looked at the largest 15 providers in the country out of 900, but the figures from that report are then extrapolated to say the whole sector is profiteering. The problem with this is that up and down the country there are some resilient and committed practitioners in children’s homes, doing an amazing job under difficult circumstances. I think we have forgotten the workforce in this and think that it is a homogenous blob of profiteering children’s homes. That is genuinely not the reality for most of the 950-odd providers of residential care. I think that the Government need to at least acknowledge and respect that diversity and be much clearer when policy announcements are made. We are doing a lot of good work with civil servants at the moment in developing community secure provision. There are significant improvements in scope, but sometimes, every now and again, there is a bit of a disconnect at the political level, like a random figure on profit caps. This is not defending any profit or not—we are a broad church—but to pluck a figure of 8.8% has battered confidence in the sector at the same time as they want the sector to invest heavily. The reality is that local authorities do not have the funding, so some of the money does have to come from the independent sector. The Government’s £40 million-odd, while welcome, was very restricted to capital again, bricks and mortar, when the capital in the children’s homes is the people. A better recognition at the political level of the challenges associated with residential care is needed.

On what else we can do to improve children’s homes, no wrong door children’s homes have attached to them foster placements, supported lodgings placements, supported accommodation and other types of placements that enable young people to move through. However, it is the same team, the same staff and the same relationships supporting them through those different placements, a strong focus on practice and a restorative practice model. They are part of a local system that also means those homes have some spare capacity and some emergency beds. It is the lack of emergency beds in the system that means you end up making very bad long-term choices because there is no local space to accommodate young people in an emergency. Those children’s homes tend to be quite expensive. They tend to be well staffed, but they are often supporting dozens of young people who are not resident in the children’s homes. They are doing EduCare work and they are supporting children in other placements as well. Seeing the children’s home as part of a local system is very important and all that needs commissioning. That comes back to my point that you cannot achieve that through spot purchasing beds.

My question follows on quite well from what Dr Kerr was just referring to, not being distracted by the few that are profiteering. However, my question is based on that because of the impact that it is having across the country. Based on the evidence of high profits being made by the largest 20 private sector providers of children’s residential care, which made over £300 million of profit in 2023, while at the same time over the last five years we have seen the number of places that are costing more than £10,000 a week rising by something like a 12-fold increase, the Government have recently set out a number of proposals to reform the social care market, such as a new financial oversight regime and a possible cap on profits. What impact do you think this will have on provision and the quality of children’s social care? On too many occasions provision and quality are not meeting expectations. I will go back to Dr Kerr with that.

There is a risk in that the policy announcements in the House a couple of weeks ago very much focused on residential, as have other reports, ignoring that the margins made by foster care were similar. Supported lodgings and semi-independent provision was about 30% or 35%, significantly higher. Residential is a political target. Every time we have had an extreme high-cost outlier—£10,000, £20,000, £30,000, £40,000, £50,000 a week—we have never been able to track it back to a regulated children’s home. They have generally been in unlawful, unregulated, unregistered placements, which the Government have now tackled and Ofsted is working its way through, but we still have 750-ish children based on the Children’s Commissioner’s data. In certain cases, they are not profiteering either. The most expensive placement that I am in contact with at the moment is a local authority young lady and it is costing £3 million a year, but that is in a local authority placement. Some of these children have very high need and high risk profiles. What I am worried about is that the majority of the sector—including Action for Children and Barnardo’s; we are a broad church—the small SME micro-providers that we are relying on are the ones that we need to expand, and they are making much smaller margins. They do not have the economies of scale. The market oversight and most of the focus of Government in this area is targeted at the very large ones, and most of those are based offshore. There is a risk that more scrutiny will push them further offshore. Unfortunately, if you put a cap on, these large multibillion-pound corporations will find a way of gaming it. It will be the smaller SME micro-providers that struggle because they do not have ways or international corporate structures that allow them to avoid that cap. It is also ignored that a lot of the time the system spillage or leakage of money is around the interest rate on loans. We speak to civil servants all the time about this. Money is being lent from tax havens at a very high interest rate, and that is nothing to do with profit. Some of these companies are not actually making a profit. All we ask is that the Government monitor the unintended consequences and whether or not any measures of fixing interest rates or fees will have the outcome they want on the companies they want.

Okay. I hear from you that you would welcome the new requirement that any new provider wishing to enter the market must be owned and domiciled in the UK?

The Children’s Homes Association believes in a mixed economy of care. When I took over the leadership, working closely with the board and our members, we believe that general taxation pays for children’s social care and what I care about is a mixed economy that delivers social value. For me, page 1 of social value is that you are subject to the tax system in the country that you receive these moneys from for public services.

There was a research paper from the University of Oxford that looked at Ofsted outcomes for for-profit and not-for-profit residential homes, which seemed to suggest that outcomes were poorer for children in for-profit homes. Can you comment on that?

Yes. As someone who was previously immersed in research, we have been quite disappointed with the framing of some of the papers. I am quite surprised that such a strong ideological flavour comes through some of them. There have been a couple of papers. One looked at historical Ofsted data, where there were disparities between the independent sector provision, local authority provision and charitable, but we know that the more high-need, high-risk kids are in the independent sector. It was also historical Ofsted data. If you look at the current data, we are pretty much in line, local authorities and the independent sector. Why are we looking at data from several years ago? I am interested in today and there is not really any difference in quality between the sectors at the moment. One of the most recent papers was on the number of notifications that a children’s home makes, and that is mandatory communications to Ofsted and LADO. That is what keeps children safe, so it is very important that they remain. However, the research paper and the subsequent media headlines were that 90% of the children’s homes that have been subject to notifications, a higher number of compliances, were in the independent sector, but that is in line with the proportion of the independent sector anyway. It was a non-statistic. Again, we urge that the debate and the rhetoric around this is firmly based on evidence of the problems that we face today, not the problems from five years ago.

We are running very short on time at this point and it will affect the time we have for the second panel, so could witnesses keep their contributions brief. Are there any further contributions on this issue from a different perspective?

I would like to hear Councillor Shah’s perspective, please.

In principle, we welcome the cap on profits. The LGA does not have an informed view, but I can certainly say we have long called for measures to tackle this. I think it is distasteful that people make enormous profits off some of our most vulnerable children, and I am pleased that the Government will look into this. I think it is a huge challenge and an issue.

The economic regulation of these providers and the inspection of all places is a mess and ineffective. The whole thing needs reform. We have a lot of inspection based on the behaviour of children during the inspection and the judgments linked to that, which creates a lot of problems. Some of these very high-cost places are not because there are very high-risk, high-need children; they are because often there is one child in a children’s home that has six places in it and all the other children have been removed. That makes it a very expensive place, but that is not really what the care plan requires. The whole thing is dysfunctional, and the use of debt and loans and profiteering is indefensible. I do not think that Ofsted has the capabilities to provide the economic regulation needed and the model of inspection is out of date.

I will ask some questions about regional care co-operatives. From the evidence you have given, it seems that most of you are in favour of the regionalisation of purchasing of residential placements—correct/incorrect? Does anyone have a problem with it?

I know the fostering regional co-operatives have worked really well. We will need about a year to see how these co-operatives work, but I think the principle of them is fine and I am completely in support.

I want to ask a question on the application and the roll out twofold. Why have local authorities not begun doing this organically already? What problems do you foresee in getting local authorities to work together? My experience is that whenever the Department for Education or anyone in Whitehall tries to tell local authorities what to do, it comes with certain problems. Can you provide any off-the-cuff evidence and what is your advice on rolling this out nationally?

I think we need collaboration and I welcome that. I do not foresee any issues. We will have seen whether these roll-outs work or not, but it is fine in principle. I cannot see an issue with it at all.

On the residential, as with the fostering, it is the higher need for the more complex children that we can get the most benefits from. I still think there is a disconnect with local accountability in keeping children local when you are going to pool your budgets. I do not know how that fits with locally based accountability in decision making.

I support regional care co-operatives. I think that local authorities work together quite a lot, but this is formalising that. They should learn from the establishment of the regional adoption agencies. There are about five different models of regional adoption agencies with different hub-and-spoke models, which sometimes make standardising practice a bit more complicated than it could be. If we are going to create these regional care co-operatives, let us not try to create lots of different types of them so that it is hard to improve practice nationally.

A more organic, collaborative and networked approach normally is more effective than one design in Whitehall.

Finally, in light of the extensive coverage of the appalling murder of Sara Sharif, without talking about the specific case, I want to invite any comments that you would like to make on current failures in child protection and reforms that are needed to deliver the level of change that can stop future tragedies of this type happening again. You might or might not want to do that with specific reference to the Government’s announcement that we have seen today about the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill restrictions on home schooling, for example, for children who are subject to child protection proceedings and measures of that nature. Before we get to the end of the session, I want to invite any comments that you would like to make on the potential strengthening of child protection.

The evidence on multi-agency approaches to family help is strong. The evidence on child protection, to my mind, is not so strong. However, any duties that local authorities want to place on local authorities to create multi-agency teams, they must also place on health services and on the police. Simply to place all the duties on local authorities will not solve the problem. Finally, I will add that the most important thing is that we focus on the practice of the staff in those multi-agency teams and the quality of the practice that they use consistently, and focus less on some of the structures that have been discussed.

I think the register that the Education Secretary announced today is hugely welcome. It gives local authorities the levers to go in. To meet with people and to exclude them from home education will be really vital. We saw the instances that led to that today. I welcome the announcements that the Secretary of State has made today, but with that we need to add the tools and the ability to have face-to-face contact with children on child protection orders as well, to strengthen the announcements that have been made today. Otherwise, one case is one case too many—horrific.

I think it is quite important that we acknowledge that, as I have said before, in residential care we are at that upper end of the care continuum. If we go down that care continuum, we have talked about the consequences if things are wrong at the front door. That is how we have ended up in the situation with as many kids as we have in care. We need to look at that and that involves child protection. It involves looking at social work. There needs to be a reset there. There is a lot of talk in the sector around a social worker without a timeline and whether we need to have a fresh look at the preventative measures much earlier on.

The key message, when I looked at some of the evidence from previous sessions, is about trying to rebalance so we have much more preventative measures early on, rather than dealing with the back end where we have children in care and we are spending all our money there. The point that Matthew made around keeping children safe is about practice. A safer practitioner with proper supervision and with the support of managers and stable colleagues makes a big difference and that helps to keep children safe. With the single unique identifier that is being identified, it is worth looking at how that might work for adoption and how the NHS record can travel with the child. It is really important for the child’s record to travel with them and there is a piece of work to be done there. The other thing is guidance for social workers. When children are home-schooled and there are child protection concerns, social workers will need guidance about how to apply that and what happens if a parent says, “I am not going to do that”. What happens next?

I thank all four of the witnesses on our first panel for coming to give your evidence this morning. We will pause the broadcast briefly while we swap over our witnesses for the second panel. Thank you very much. Witnesses: Jo Harrison, Harriet Edwards, Katharine Sacks-Jones and Maris Stratulis.

We will resume the public proceedings of the Education Select Committee evidence session on children’s social care. Thank you to our witnesses for coming to give your evidence to us this morning. I will make the same announcement that I did at the start of our first evidence session about the appalling murder of Sara Sharif and ask everybody to note that because the sentencing hearing in that case has not yet concluded—it may conclude while we are sitting this morning; it is due to take place today—we are subject to the sub judice rules, which means that we cannot discuss any of the details of that case this morning. I ask you to stick within those parameters while you are here this morning. I ask each of our witnesses to introduce yourselves, starting with Maris.

Hello. My name is Maris Stratulis, and I am the national director for the British Association of Social Workers England. I am a registered social worker. We have a membership of over 22,000 members from across the sector, including education, social workers in children’s services, adult services, health and palliative care, just as an example. Thank you.

Good morning. I am Harriet Edwards, head of policy, public affairs and research for Sense, a national disability charity. I am also here today representing the Disabled Children’s Partnership, which is a coalition of more than 110 organisations including Parent Carers, of which we are a member, and representing myself, because I am also a parent carer to a five-year-old with cerebral palsy.

My name is Jo Harrison. I am co-chair and director of the National Network of Parent Carer Forums. We have a membership of over 156,000 from 153 parent carer forums that make up the network across England. I am a parent carer myself and I am here to represent the views of our membership today.

Good morning. My name is Katharine Sacks-Jones. I am the chief executive of Become and we are the national charity for children in care and young care leavers.

Thank you very much. We will start with some questions on disabled children’s care. My first question is particularly for Harriet and Jo. Is the level of provision for disabled children’s social care adequate? How easy—or not, as the case may be—is it for parents to access support?

Quite simply, it is not good enough; time and again, disabled children are being overlooked by the social care system. A recent report from the Disabled Children’s Partnership found that one in five families are not getting the support they need for their child to reach their full potential and one in seven said they are not getting the correct level of social care support either. As has been discussed, demand is rising in the system and there are a lot of tensions, but what happens time and again is that disabled children and their families get treated with suspicion, with shame and through a safeguarding lens, rather than receiving support from the very start. At Sense, we are hearing this a lot with our families. There has been a real increase in the complexity of needs, and often when people reach us, they are in crisis at that point. Early intervention has not been there, they are often on their knees and respite support is rarely available where they live.

I agree with Harriet. Many of our parents report that they are viewed through a safeguarding lens rather than with a person-centred view. Many parents feel that they are blamed and fear social care engagement for fear of child removal. Insufficient carers assessments are repeatedly reported and the barriers to access are harsh. Parents and carers often express a huge level of concern around the training of social care and the lack of understanding of the difficulties that face children and young people with SEND, particularly the impact that it has on the rest of the family, particularly siblings. The safeguarding over the needs lens is huge and adding inconsistency of practice from social workers and social care. We are only seeing really good practice when people are going above and beyond, rather than it being a standard practice. When we look at access, the criteria are often not transparent. It is often a postcode lottery, with what accesses you can get depending on where you live, and that causes a lot of frustration. You can access a service in one area, but you cannot access it in another, and there is little transparency over those provisions. If you are getting personal budgets, you cannot get the carers to fulfil those, so generally it is quite difficult for families. I think there is a real lack of trust in the system.

This is a question to Harriet and Jo, as well. The previous Committee heard evidence that parents are struggling to access and use personal budgets. What changes need to be made, in your views, to ensure that personal budgets work effectively?

In principle, personal budgets are great, and we can all welcome personalisation—children’s needs should be at the centre of the money that is there—but in reality that is not what we see on the ground. A lot of families are really struggling to manage that money. It is an extra pressure on them. When living with a disabled child, your to-do list is very long. It is often adding on something that someone has to deal with. When it comes to employment and the workforce challenges, many families cannot get the staff they need to fill these budgets. A lot of research has shown that. Also, it is the small packets of funding. How are you going to get someone for two hours every morning to support your child if that is all that you have been granted? It is really very challenging in practice.

We agree. Comprehensive reform is needed to simplify the process for parents and carers. We would say, like anyone, to look at increasing the funding. As we have said, if you are going to get access for two hours a week, how are you supposed to employ somebody for those two hours? There is quite an administrative burden for parents. They have to look for members of staff to fulfil their roles and they effectively then become employers to some of those people. There are really strict rules around the usage of that funding and often, if you cannot use the funding, you have to give it back. Quite a lot of people do not even try to get the funding because the administrative burden is too high and that can impact the whole family. For us, the process needs to be simpler. There needs to be more trust and equity in the ability to use that funding and to be more creative. I think it also links into poor commissioning of local services. If we do not commission the services for people to buy into, how are we supposed to use the funding appropriately?

I absolutely agree. The access needs to be a lot smoother and the thresholds in many local authorities have increased. I primarily believe that is about the financial pressures and the legacy of deficits and budget restraints. It is really hard for parents and carers to access that support. I would also like to go back to an earlier point that I think there is some fantastic social work out there in the community. It is really important that we celebrate the good aspects of social work. I know of many families from a child in need perspective that have been able to access support and services, not just from social workers but also from social care practitioners. It is really important that we keep a lens on the good aspects of social work, as well, but I absolutely agree about the training and the support for social workers. There needs to be an investment in continuous professional development across the board and that includes CPD, learning, training and development in children’s disability and adult disability. We are one profession, and we should not just see children in isolation. They are part of integral important families and communities that support them in their life.

No, that is fine. I spoke to some of our members this week about the issue of looking at social care and whether that should be an integrated or a separate service. A lot of parents advocate for a separate service. People are doing so because they feel that that would avoid the safeguarding lens because you would have people who fully understand the needs of the children and young people and the dynamic of the family. They feel that having a separate service would provide consistent and clearer support and having a person-centred approach. That said, with a separate service you would need to be very clear about how the responsibilities sit. As you move through to adult social care, you need to ensure that transition is clear. It would need to be transparent and seamless as the children grow older, because we know that often the transition is a real cliff edge for many of our young people. The other side of it is if you have a fully integrated service, you have a one-stop shop, for want of a better word. From that perspective, it would be financially beneficial for the Government, but I think that it would come with some concerns that you would have to train the whole workforce to a specific level. How do you ensure that you have the relevant CPD practice, that growing and knowledge and understanding? There is some great practice, but it often relies on those going above and beyond. If you are wanting to move away from that, you need to ensure that the whole workforce is trained to a standard.

I absolutely echo all that Jo has said. For us, the transition stage into adulthood is key, especially to echo the Government’s ambitions for getting Britain working. These are the key things that will help disabled young people into work. You have to have high-quality social care to do that and at the moment there is just a cliff edge in that support. The other point for us is to emphasise on the multi-agency side the early intervention opportunities here if we can reach families at the first stages of diagnosis in the neonatal units, when they are coming out into the community, working with health visitors and across the community support. It is not just in social care; it is across the community, and health has been mentioned a lot as well. We know that in some of those early contact moments with health children are not being signposted at that point to social care. In principle, that single assessment process could be really helpful. At the moment, parents are juggling multiple appointments. I think I had maybe 300 last year before my son started school and I am working full time on top of that. It is just not feasible unless you have a really flexible employer and family support locally, as well. I am lucky in that sense, but so many families are not. The other thing I will emphasise is the disparities here and the way the system is increasing inequality at the moment. The recent report from the Disabled Children’s Partnership focused on black and Asian families found that that was even more entrenched. The feelings of shame and suspicion are very different for the ethnic biases that are applied.

You asked about how education can fit into that model. I think that parents and carers will often feel—I am sure that my colleagues will agree—that there is a lack of co-ordination between social care and education and health. We need to be bringing those together to have better multi-agency working. In particular, we have some statutory processes and non-statutory processes around support for children and young people. We do not see social care engaging at times, whether that is capacity, knowledge, understanding or even, in things like the EHCP process, providing good quality advice and support or annual reviews. That is for the more complex children, but we also do not see social care engaging where children and young people having graduated approach support or SEND support in school, that ordinary, available provision. It is really difficult to get any form of universal advice or support or have that social care interaction, even if it is to signpost and give quality information about short breaks, respite and things that families can access on a universal level.

It is important that we go back to the best interest of the child that is enshrined within the Children Act 1989. I think it is important, as a Committee, to consider that the focus is on children first, and absolutely disabled children as well. I have concerns about going down separate track routes of legislation for disabled children. We need to be improving the leadership and the practice at an integrated level. This is not just about social care. This is about health, community and the voluntary sector. It is about investment in local services and advocacy services, and that comes with a charge. That comes with a cost packet. In the independent review of children’s social care, we know there was a recommendation of an investment of £2.6 billion. There has been investment, but it falls short of that amount of money and it is not acceptable. If we are really going to put children first and disabled children and their parents and carers, we need to make sure that it is a system that has investment and that there is also investment in the workforce. I absolutely hear what you are saying about the training for social workers, but we need to invest in training also at the point where they start their career framework. That is the student social workers. It is about investment in social work bursaries. I cannot emphasise enough that I truly do not believe this is just about statutory framework. This is about best practice, leadership and place. It is about real investment in support services at place level and making services accessible to residents and communities and, certainly, parents and carers of disabled children.

Maris, can I ask you to address specifically the feedback from parents’ organisations, that parents of disabled children feel that they are being viewed by social workers through a lens of child protection? That is not an issue about funding or frameworks. It is an issue about practice and surely that should never be happening.

Absolutely, but it is within the context of that work environment; I think last year 630,000 referrals came into social care. There is something within the culture of supervision and reflective supervision within the workplace and social workers do not have the time currently. We are hearing time and time again from social workers about high case work, about stress and about burnout. The focus on child protection and safeguarding, when that should not be the case, is about reflection. That is somebody saying, “Why are you focusing on that?” and looking at the framework for thresholds and people getting access in the system.

We should not overlook the huge overlap between children in the care system and disability. Children in care are far more likely to have a special educational need than children not in care. They do not always have someone there who is advocating for them. We have heard about some of the challenges in the workforce, the turnover of professionals and people not knowing those children, so not having that stability of a parent carer who can advocate for them to make sure that they get the support that they need. You also heard from the earlier panel about instability within the care system and you discussed the issue of distance placements. We know children with more complex needs are more likely to be placed further from home. They are more likely to face multiple changes in their homes and in where they are living, and that makes it even harder for them to access support. It means there are challenges around the continuity of support that they might be accessing and, simply, that there are professionals around them who do not know them and do not know their needs. It is a big challenge and I think it is important that we recognise that over half of children in care have a special educational need. Sometimes we talk about these things in isolation, but it is important to recognise the particular challenges for disabled children in the care system.

Thank you for your answers so far. We know that there are shortages of staff everywhere across the sector. We know that pay and workload often come up, so by all means reference pay and workload in your answers, but I will be interested in other things too. What measures do you think are needed to deal with the shortages of staff? Specifically, what do we need to do across social workers, disabled children’s care workforce and residential care home workers?

The shortage and the turnover of staff is a huge issue, and I am sure you will hear more from colleagues about that. From the children’s and young people’s perspective, they tell us that constantly having to rebuild relationships, the revolving door of professionals who make huge decisions about their life, and having to tell their story repeatedly is a massive challenge. I want to add personal advisers to your list of workforce professionals, because they are often overlooked. These are the professionals who support young people from care into more independent living when they are leaving care. There is very little training for those professionals, no statutory training and no statutory qualification. We hear from young people that personal advisers can be a key and brilliant support in helping make the transition into adulthood, but they can also have a very poor understanding and not offer much support at all. There is huge variance and that is a key role that we do not often focus on very much. In thinking about workforce, we need to think about personal advisers as well as challenges around other professionals in the workforce.

That is very similar in early intervention as well. Families resonate all the time with these roles that bring communities together, such as the Portage scheme, for example, and say that it is so critical, and that having these people to linchpin together and help them navigate the service, apply for the right benefits, support them with the EHC process and even just understanding some of the forms is so helpful. I know you said no pay and workload, but I will add that as a not-for-profit provider, there are significant challenges that the sector is facing with national insurance increases. From the Sense perspective, with the combination of things announced in the Budget with the national living wage, we are facing a £5 million increase next year, so that will have a knock-on impact for social care. That is more within our adult social care provision, but we should not be looking at these things as adults and children either. The disconnect between adults and children is another significant issue from a provider and workforce perspective. We are not recruiting any charity staff. The big thing is the lack of specialists. For us it is multi-sensory impairment specialists in local areas. There is a recommendation that every local authority should have one, but our research found that half of local authorities do not. For children who are deaf-blind that is literally the difference between them having the support to access the world around them or not. It is also the specialism and training, particularly for people in the highest need groups.

A starting point for me is the promotion and value of social work and social care and that goes across the sector in all areas of work. There is such a negative image, messaging and narrative at the moment that it is putting people off going into this career. I mean a career in a broader sense, from a community level, from a social care practitioner level, in residential services and support services. I call out the Committee to look at how that messaging can change and the message and value of social work and the contribution that it makes. I also think there is an important opportunity here in the mission pillars of Government and looking at opportunity. How can we encourage the next generation of workers in all those aspects to see this as a career that is really valued and can support them in employment? That is something we need to look at. How do we support those people who may have experienced disabilities, who have special educational needs to enter this career market? I also call for more investment in training and development, and the comment from Harriet earlier was spot on. We used to have welfare advisers in so many community-based services. Welfare advisers used to be part of social work structures. They would support families and vulnerable people to access the services and benefits that they need. Most of those roles have gone and I also call back for that. Finally, there is the mobility between practitioners. We have social workers and social care practitioners in adult services who want to move to children’s services and vice versa, but we are starting to see the separation of children’s services and adult services and that is not good for families or practitioners.

I will ask a quick question, predominantly to Maris, on the back of this conversation. To what extent do you recognise a statement that practitioners currently operate in a climate of risk aversion and fear of getting something wrong?

That is a very fair comment. I think they do in some areas, and that is again partly linked to media coverage. I think it is about a process structure when things become process-driven—complete the assessment, tick the box. There is less of a focus on reflective practice, but reflective practice comes with time. I cannot emphasise enough today the importance of social workers having time to develop sustainable relationships with the children and families that they work with and parents and carers. Currently they do not have that, so they are reverting back to a process-driven model of service delivery. I think that has cascaded down. It is influenced by inspection regimes that become tick box-driven in many instances and the pressure, not just within social work and social care but across the board, to respond to queries and responses—some of which may also include elected Members. How do we move away from an administration process and return back to a professional practice-based approach?

When we talk about being risk averse, the impact of that on parents is that we operate a deficit model. We are not operating with a person-centred approach, and this is where parents feel that they are then viewed through a safeguarding lens, because we do not understand the dynamics of the family. We are going through that tick-box, process-driven way of managing things, rather than taking a step back and analysing the family, the child, the dynamics and understanding the needs and dealing with that on an individual basis. I do not think that we celebrate the strengths that families have and the strengths that social work can bring to that family and how we can push them forward. We certainly do not have neuro-affirming practices, and, as that is a growing demographic, it is important that we have better understanding of differences. As you have mentioned, early intervention is key. We think of social care as the crisis level but, if we do not provide good signposting, quality information and specialist staff before that, we create a funnel where we just move people into the deficit model of safeguarding and social care is seen at the top end rather than universally.

I want to ask a quick question about what Harriet Edwards said. I was struck by the scale of the figure of £5 million for your charity, if I heard correctly, extra because of the Budget. Do you expect to be able to raise that money from extra donations or do you expect to reduce the headcount of your charity? Do you expect to reduce the services delivered to children? What gives with that sum of money?

We are really worried and a lot of other charities in the sector are as well. A report came out this week showing how vast the impact is on the not-for-profit sector. No, we do not expect to be able to raise that. Charities do not have that surplus in the services we deliver. We are not like for-profit providers where we have room where we can just pay from profit. A lot of this work is local authority funded, so there will be a knock-on impact. We will have to raise our funds through commissioning, and we are not optimistic that that will be available from the money that was provided in the Budget. We are hoping and having a lot of conversations about this, and a lot is being talked about with Government at the moment, so something needs to happen here. From our perspective, it is looking at the funding in the round. We are delivering statutory contracts, so it is just taking from one and giving to another at this point and it will impact on disabled children and disabled adults. It is about personalised support. It is about commissioning services based on what people need and not on how much it costs or trying to put people into shoestring budgets. I can send you a detailed breakdown of what that looks like.

That is really interesting because what you seem to be saying is that without some change in Government policy your charity will deliver fewer services to deaf and blind children.

That is what the report this week has shown from VODG, which is the coalition for voluntary sector providers. A significant number of us are looking at ways that we can cut this, and it will probably come down to closing services in many cases.

This is a brief follow-up from my original question. Katharine, you quite rightly highlighted that the three examples I gave did not cover the entire workforce. Maris came and said that we need to value social care more. I talked about pay and workload. I am looking for any other specific measures we can take to retain and recruit social care workers, care workers. For example, we know that the student bursaries have been frozen for eight years. Should we unlock that to get more staff into the sector? I wanted to come back to see if there are any other measures I have missed out.

Certainly student bursaries, but also a redesign of the way teams are structured. I am not talking from a child protection or children need perspective here, but the numbers of children and families that social workers and social care staff work with. That will be a big investment and it will be about allocating time and quality. As I say, to build relationships with families, it is about time. We receive phone calls from social workers who are talking about caseloads of 28 young people that they are working with, with high levels of child protection and children in need within the system and, going back to the earlier point, what happens in terms of who gets that service at what given time. It comes back to thresholds and risk and managing risk. We have good examples also of many social workers and social work leaders who are managing risk well. Social workers are operating seven days a week, morning, noon and night, and it is about reinvestment in that workforce. With pay and parity, social workers and social care workers do not get the same pay standards as, for example, our colleagues in health. There is something here about equal value and we must start investing in the workforce. Ultimately, we need to make sure we get the best for children and families and that will happen from an effective workforce. Finally on this point, one example is there is funding currently for Oliver McGowan training. That funding funnel is coming through the NHS. I am speaking to colleagues in social work who cannot access that training because the funding is coming through and it is ringfenced for NHS workers. I call for an integrated funding pot for continuous professional development for staff and for community organisations.

This is a really good example where disabled children have not been put at the forefront of a lot of the proposals that have been put forward. I value a lot of what has been said by the Government around early intervention and strengthening the system. The Law Commission review is incredibly welcome, and it has been great at engaging parent carers, but yet again, in the rhetoric, disabled children and the high-quality support for social care, or the vision for social care in what it can do to change people’s lives, is a different narrative. It comes first from safeguarding and child protection. That also changes the way that charities such as ours and parent carers see themselves within the system. They probably do not see themselves in what you have just said, I would imagine. At the very worst end of it we hear from families who are told they are above a threshold for social care support and in fact their needs are too high, and it becomes a battle between health and social care about who will pay for them. A lot of the time we are told by these families they just end up backing away because, if they do not back away, they are then put at risk of safeguarding. They are told, “If we can’t support you, it is clearly a child protection issue.” That is scary and worrying, because the families we hear from are probably not the worst stories. The worst ones are the people who do not have the time and capacity to come forward, they do not have the skills, the knowledge, they do not know what they are entitled to. Also, they are in legal decisions at the moment. We cannot get the stories of a lot of the people we speak to out in the media if they have legal cases ongoing, so people do not hear the worst of it.

There is a growing risk of if there is the distinction between health and social care, we are seeing a growing number of parents and carers being concerned that have fabricated illnesses. That becomes again a parent blaming lens, “You must go on a parenting course because that will fix all of your woes. Your child’s behaviour must be your fault,” or, “We can’t see that so it can’t exist.” We look at masking in education; we have moved through and we now accept masking is there and it is different and children can be perceived differently in different environments, but we still do not have that more widely, and there is a huge difference in how we focus. It seems to be a very detrimental focus, rather than coming in with a positive view about how we can help, and it does not have that early intervention viewpoint.

Yes. I think you must have a positive narrative and you must build a culture where people feel that they can go to social care to get help rather than feel that, if they go to social care, they will have their child taken away. That, sadly, is what many people have and that then means that the early intervention is either not provided or available or parents are not signposted. Then the needs escalate, which not only costs more to resolve, but impacts on a child’s or young person’s outcome and the family outcome. That is when we see families breaking down. We need to build a culture where people feel social care is the place to come where they can get the appropriate advice and support without being put through that safeguarding lens.

People do not understand what it means. When it works well, it is transformative and amazing. It means disabled children making friends, playing, having a break in the summer holidays. It is parents having an extra 10 minutes at the weekend to be able to look after themselves—I know that 10 minutes does not sound a lot, but that is the reality for a lot of parents. I want to put out there that that is a narrative we should be entrenching in these reforms.

From a perspective of children at risk of entering the care system, early intervention is absolutely key. We know there has been a shift—as you heard from the last panel—in spending to late intervention versus early intervention. It is important that we look at what support is there for families to help them earlier, before those issues escalate and children are removed into the care system. That undoubtedly is part of the piece. I think one of the earlier panellists spoke about double spending. We cannot just reset the system, because there are children who will need support within the care system now and who are often getting a very poor deal. We need to do that as well as look at those early intervention measures; hopefully in time those will mean fewer children enter the care system, but that is not going to happen overnight. The other point to make is the issue of poverty. All the early intervention and support in the world does not negate the effect of poverty on the numbers of children entering the care system and there is very clear evidence that increases in poverty lead to increases in children entering care. It is about early support and early intervention, yes, but also support for those children who do go into the care system and thinking about the impacts of poverty on families as well.

To reinforce what Katharine said, certainly from the poverty perspective it is about a whole-system approach. We fully support investment in early help and family group decisions. That is integral. In many instances there is a network of support that can be enabled to help children at a local place level and within families. We certainly support the development and the investment in community-based resources, some of the examples that we have heard from Harriet today, but it is part of the continuum and there are some children who need to access other forms of support from social work and social care. It is making sure that we have the balance of financial investment and the time to develop those important relationships with children and with families.

On those community services, we see a huge shift between commission providers directing people through to the voluntary sector, which is great because a lot of that is peer-led. They have some wonderful support and provision. However, most of these are unfunded and rely on local authority or local ICB funding, which we know is tightening. We are seeing a lot of these organisations closing their gaps, because they do not have the funding or the volunteer workforce to deliver these much-needed services. The restrictions we place around how we fund our local community provisions will have wider impacts because they are the first line of defence. If we are not funding or investing and valuing our community services, we will see an impact with more demand for statutory and commissioned provision.

I want to touch on good-quality early intervention. Jo, I believe you made a point about parenting classes and support for parents being stigmatising, which is disappointing to hear, because it should not be. Can all four people on the panel give the Committee an idea of what good early intervention programmes look like, and specific examples of which programmes out there you think should be expanded and scaled up?

There are some brilliant parenting support initiatives. Where parenting programmes have become an issue is where they are used as a barrier for support: “You can only access this support if you have gone on this 12-week programme.” Can I name a programme? There will be programmes such as Triple P, which is a parenting programme, but it is aimed at children who are not necessarily neurodiverse. If I am going to go on a parenting programme and you are going to teach me all wonderful things about how to raise my children, but none of that is relevant because my child has autism or high anxiety and you are not going to give me the tools, that parenting programme might be lovely but it is not going to support my understanding of how to meet my child’s needs. If we are going to use parenting programmes, they should be done alongside the support. The guidance that came out for the autism pathways last year talks about the damage that can be done if we put barriers in place before early intervention. They are useful and they can be useful, but we need to invest in programmes that support neurodevelopment. If you are going to run a parenting course, you must teach people about how to parent a child with autism, how to educate them, how to understand them. We need to empower them. With things such as sensory needs we need to empower parents to understand children’s needs so they can flex. If my child is having a meltdown and I am told, “If you put them in a bouncy ball for 10 minutes they will calm down,” that is great, but next week they might want to swing and a week after that they might need to stand upside down and the week after that they might need to rock. I need someone to empower me to understand my child and how I can meet their needs so I can then recognise what they need to do. That is what we need to do. We need to empower parents to support their children, not putting them in a box and saying they cannot get any other support unless they have done this programme, when that programme does not meet those child’s needs. Most of all, it is advice and support. We have lots of parenting books. No one comes into the world with a book about how to raise a child. Every child is different, but we need people to signpost and understand. You have the local offers, which are great, but I challenge you to go and find your own local offer and find a provision, and if you can find that without going through 10 different pages on that website, which will all tell you that they cannot help you, I will be very surprised. Often you are given a whole list of websites and you have to go all the way through them and most of what you will get is, “Your child does not meet the criteria” or you will go through the phone call or you will put in the email and you will wait and they will say, “You’ve got an EHCP so we can’t help you”. We need clear advice, we need communication and we need to understand what the access criteria are—and we need that presented in a communicative way. Having people who can help us navigate that is really useful.

I echo all those things. We hear time and again that peer-led support is transformative at that early stage. That has been shown also in the Disabled Children’s Partnership report around ethnic communities specifically: they benefited from talking to people in their own communities with similar backgrounds as well. Being a parent carer can be a lonely journey. You have gone through probably quite a lot of trauma at this stage at a very difficult time of life for parents anyway, when you have a small baby, so having that peer network cannot be understated. That is really valuable for people. We run an early intervention programme at Sense and we hear from parents all the time how valuable that is, but we can only work in the areas where we can get the funding for it. We would love it to be bigger, but at the moment it is very patchy with the funding available for services. As Jo said, with specialist support for disabled children, they are not one group. There is huge diversity within that label, so having that specialism and having those services commissioned in a way that works for children with different needs is important. Multi-sensory impairment would be an example of that. They will have very different needs and the parents will need different skills for life, such as sign language and Makaton, that other parents will not necessarily need as much. There is the partnership model in local areas, when we see it working well, so partnerships with charities, with the local authority, where there are those pathways and that ease of access. In some areas it does work well, but it is often where you have leading, passionate people, maybe in social services, maybe in the hospital, but they have made an effort to make themselves connected and champions for disabled children.

I also think good models are about in-person contact. Too often we hear of parents and family members who are struggling to speak to a person, honestly. They are making contact with an organisation and it is, “Press 1, press 2, listen to music”. Good models are about being able to get the right access at the right time and speak to a person and having the time to be listened to and the flexibility. People talk to us about wanting 24/7 contact numbers. I think that is a good model. At 10 pm when a parent or young person is struggling, where is the support outside of a statutory service? How can we be creative and dynamic about those preventative services? There are models of good practice, certainly within the voluntary and community sector. I have direct experience of working in an early help model that included workers from disabled services, from substance misuse services and welfare advice benefit advisers as well as social care and health workers. That is the type of integrated model, where it is the first point of contact, where people do not have to repeat their story. People can sit down and talk about their child or young person, and the services are working with that child or young person. That is what good models of practice are about. It is about relationship-based practice.

I must move us on because we are running tight on time, and we have some other important questions that we want to get through.

I have a very quick question related to what Patrick has just asked and what Jo said about parenting classes. We know that in some cases they can be very effective at helping with children who have a challenging behaviour. How do we change that narrative from being a culture of fear that a parent is being told they are not doing things correctly to empowering parents to do things in perhaps a different way and to offer them different options so that we have a different culture towards it?

I think it is the communication—that is key—and the communication that is being delivered and the narrative around that. You can have the same course delivered by two different people, but if you have a very different lens being applied by those two different people it will come across differently. The main thing is that they should not be used as a barrier to access other services. That is where it comes in—“You must go on this course.”—but it is not specific for that child’s needs. You cannot do a course for every different child’s needs, but there are national things such as Sense, and if you have a sight impairment then that would be a good place to go and help them and they would be able to talk to you about how you can communicate with your child or young person, which is going to support their behavioural needs and you can support them effectively. But you would not send the parent of a child that has a sight and hearing impairment to a course that is not going to give them any support around that. It is the same with a child that has autism or ADHD. Those disabilities might not be as visible, but they still have different behaviours that need different types of support. You must provide the right support at these courses.

I will move us on, because we have important topic areas we have not yet covered.

My question is to Maris and Katharine on reunification. The previous Committee heard evidence stating that reunification with their families for children in care is often not at the focus that it needs to be in children’s social care. Do you agree?

Yes, in short. We know that a large proportion of children in care will go back to their birth families. About a quarter will go back to their birth families, but a significant proportion of those children will then return to the care system within six years because that reunification has not worked. Often what can happen is there is a lot of focus on the family until a child goes into care and then it stops. The child will be returned and there has been no work, no support done with the family in the intervening period. There needs to be a much more concentrated effort to ensure that, where it is possible, reunification works, because otherwise it is just a whole heap of extra instability for the child and for the family.

I agree. I do not think there is enough time and investment again in that particular area. Being absolutely honest with the Committee, I think because of the pressure in many local authorities and with thresholds, once a child is in an alternative place of permanency even for an interim period, sometimes it is, “Right, how can we work with the next child coming in the system?” I am being honest about that. There does need to be investment and, in some areas, there need to be specialist teams as well as generic teams. There needs to be a focus on this area of work. For some children and young people, we also need to be honest that sometimes it is very difficult, for complex reasons, for some children to move back to their families. For the most part, though, we actively support reunification. Again, it is investment in teams and structures within local authorities and organisations. It is not just the child and family; it is the support around the child and family when the young person returns home, what services are available within the community and what will be the long-term support.

This is a question for Katharine and Maris primarily. Leaving care can feel like walking towards a cliff edge for many young people. What are your views on the Government’s proposed measures to support care leavers, in particular the extension of the Staying Close support?

You are right, it is a massive cliff edge. We know that one in three young people leaving care become homeless within two years of leaving care. There has been a significant increase in the rates of homelessness among young care leavers over the last five years, so it is an area that absolutely needs attention. We think the extension of Staying Close is a step in the right direction. It will be for young people up to 25 years and it will cover children both in foster care and in residential and other settings. That is welcome. Some of the limitations and concerns that we have are that it places a duty on the local authority to assess if a child might need a package of support. We know that when those discretionary elements are baked in, it often means that a lot of young people who need that support are not going to get it. Given the sufficiency challenges facing councils at the moment, we think that that threshold is concerning. We also know that there is an issue around young people being aware and able to access their rights and entitlements, so there is a question about how that would work with the expansion. What would that package of support contain? What are the minimum standards around that? Are we likely to see very variable levels and quality of the support provided? It is a step in the right direction, but we think that there are some issues that need addressing there.

I fully endorse what has just been said. We would probably go a step further in that there needs to be a review of the Equality Act 2010 and for children in care to become a protected characteristic. That is not just while the young person is in the care system, but post. We know that many young people in care, as well as many other children, suffer from issues of discrimination, racism, oppression, poverty and poor housing. Particularly for vulnerable young people who have been in the care system, we know that there is a higher rate of young people in the prison system. That must be addressed and certainly for rough sleepers as well and people who do not get access to the support and housing that they should at a place level. We certainly support it, but we would also look at how we can strengthen statute in supporting people who have been in the care system as a protected characteristic.

On the issue of a protected characteristic—I should caveat that it is not an area that we have done a huge amount of work on—there are a few things that need looking at. One is the calls that are growing within the care experienced community for it to be a protected characteristic. I think we need to look at those, but also to understand where there are some concerns. There are some mixed views there, but it seems to be there is broad support and that needs to be looked at. The second is understanding where councils have voluntarily opted to make care a protected characteristic without a legal change. What are the kinds of changes and what is the good practice there? The third thing is being clear about what equalities legislation can achieve and what it is unlikely to achieve. It can tackle issues around discrimination—better data collection, impact assessments and so on. Will it end the care cliff? I am not sure. We need to understand what it might achieve, but also the other changes that are needed. It is not an either/or. It is not that a protected characteristic would solve all the problems within the care system, but it might bring some advantages. There needs to be a clear debate about what it could do and what some of those limitations are, because it will not solve everything.

It is not a silver bullet?

It is not a silver bullet.

What further measures would you like to see to improve support for care leavers? Are you in favour of a national offer for care leavers?

Yes, I think so. We would like to see the expansion of Staying Put as well, so enabling young people to stay with their foster families where that is an option. We would like to see both Staying Close and Staying Put be opt-out legal entitlements up to the age of 25. Young people leaving care get a lower rate of universal credit, about £20 a week lower than over-25s, as all under-25s do, and that is predicated on having family support. Often young people leaving care do not have family support, so we think that they should be entitled to the over-25 rate of universal credit. On corporate parenting, where the Government have said they will expand those duties to a range of public bodies, there needs to be proper accountability. We need to see changes to the homelessness legislation to tighten the safety net and to make sure that there is proper housing support for all young people leaving the care system.

There are a few Members looking at possibly forming an APPG on care leaving as a protected characteristic, so it would be good to carry on that conversation. My question is about best practice. We are talking very much about policy, but in best practice, where should we be looking for successful care leaving offers and experiences and processes, in this country or internationally?

We can definitely come back on specifics around local authority areas. There are good schemes. Staying Close and Staying Put are good schemes; they are showing real promise and there is evidence that they are reducing the levels of homelessness among young people leaving care. Where we know things work, it is also about making sure that we roll those out so that young people are entitled to them. We can also learn where things are not working. For example, the expansion of corporate parenting is brilliant, a great initiative, and it is already happening in Scotland, but the issue in Scotland is that it lacks teeth and accountability. While there is some brilliant practice, for example in the university sector, other public bodies are not doing what they should. There is a risk that what will happen in England now will not have the levels of accountability we would like to see. Corporate parenting bodies will only need to report every three years and it will be like marking their own homework. What more can we do? There is a good measure there that could have some teeth, but how do we give it teeth? We are hoping it will be brought forward as part of the discussion around the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.

Finally, are there any further areas of the DFE’s recent policy paper Keeping Children Safe, which we have not discussed, that you would like to respond to?

Very briefly, I know that you spoke with the previous panel about distance placements. That is an issue that Become has been looking at a lot. It is a growing problem that needs addressing. There are welcome steps in the paper. More needs to be done on looking at sufficiency within the care system nationally.

Certainly tackling the profiteering of out-of-borough placements and care provider placements across the market, including fostering agencies, is very welcome. It is abhorrent to think that profits are being made from the vulnerabilities of children and young people, so we fully support that action. Maybe it does not go far enough. We are also concerned about sometimes wholesale project teams that may go into local authorities at very high cost, so we would welcome that also being scrutinised. On broader issues, we do not think there is enough of a focus on anti-racism and on anti-oppressive and anti-discriminatory practice within all the proposals; we would like to explore having that strengthened in core principles. Finally, as one of the enablers, it is important that there is a revisit of the workforce and the conditions of social workers and social care staff. That needs to be a stand-alone enabler.

There has been a big gap around holiday provision for disabled children. We have not spoken about short breaks, but we saw that in the paper from DFE. The Short Breaks Innovation Fund is due to end in April next year and nothing has come out from Government on it. This is a fund that has enabled some local authorities to provide and spearhead holidays, but a lot of areas are just a desert for holiday provision. In some areas there is nothing that disabled children can access in the summer holidays and similar for wraparound care. It just does not work for disabled children. A lot of what is in that paper is a bit irrelevant—breakfast clubs, for example. Universal breakfast clubs are so far away for disabled children. They cannot even get into the ones that are there at the moment. We thought there was a real lens missing in the DFE paper. I also want to add on data and evidence that we welcome the unique identifier idea. There is such a gap in any granularity of data on disability. How are you meant to have intelligent service design? How are social workers meant to know what their local areas need if the data is just not there? We think that could be transformative in helping to unpack that.

On the short breaks, which is a brilliant opportunity for many children and young people, where we see delays with pathways for children and young people to be able to access diagnosis, many of these services are diagnosis-led. Where there might be a two or three-year delay to get a diagnosis of autism, many of these children and young people cannot access the facilities that short breaks offer, so that is also something to consider. The innovation funds were great, because a lot of them expanded to have those who were waiting on a pathway but are unable to do that on a long-term basis.

One final very brief point; I would not overlook the issue of children in care being placed in supported accommodation. There has been a big growth in the use of supported accommodation, which is often not appropriate for young people. You also touched on unregistered illegal homes earlier, and I think both of those areas need attention.

I want to ask one quick final question, mainly for Maris. Reflecting on the very high-profile case that we have in the media at the moment, which raises many questions about child protection, and other serious cases that we have had in recent living memory, you have called in the evidence today for a shift from a very process-driven accountability model for social work to saying, “Can we just get back to professional practice and trust social workers?”. We can see some of the pitfalls with the model as it is now, with the workload and so forth, but where does accountability come? In the minds of the general public there are these cases where we have clear evidence of failures in practice, where children have been seen by services and known to services, and they still end up with very serious harm coming to them. In a different model, where is the accountability in that approach?

Safeguarding is everybody’s agenda—I am absolutely clear about that—and that is across different organisations including social work, social care, health, the police, the voluntary and community sector, and often there can be place-based local intelligence where neighbours or people in the community have heard things that are happening to a particular child or young person. It is how we focus on citizenship and safeguarding becoming collectively everybody’s agenda. Accountability is an integrated perspective, there is no doubt about that. I think there is far too much blame, which sadly is happening again, and we do need to talk about it: an individual social worker or a specific practitioner will be named in the press and they do not look at the granular detail until we are focused on the review and government reviews. The accountability is at a place level, it is across an integrated organisation level and certainly at a national level. If mistakes have happened and there are concerns about competency or capacity, those need to be addressed at an organisation level. Too often it is about time. I know I have repeated that a lot today but, honestly, we are hearing of people dealing with far too much work, dreading coming into work, not sleeping at night because they are worried about the children and young people on their caseload. The accountability must happen at a system leadership level as well as at a practitioner level in their discussions and ongoing reflective practice with their social work managers.

Thank you very much. Thank you to all our witnesses for coming to give your evidence to us today. I thank members for your questions as well. That brings our session to an end.