21
Public Services Committee
Corrected oral evidence: Committee inquiry into the implementation strategy for children’s social care
Wednesday 29 March 2023
3 pm
Watch the meeting
Evidence Session No. 4 Heard in Public Questions 18 – 22
Witness
I: Dame Rachel de Souza, Children’s Commissioner for England.
Examination of witness
Dame Rachel de Souza.
Q18 The Chair: Welcome to this evidence session of the Public Services Committee inquiry into the implementation of the children's social care strategy. We are looking at the Government's recent proposals for addressing the needs identified in children's social care, and our witness today is Dame Rachel de Souza, the Children’s Commissioner for England.
Dame Rachel de Souza: Thank you. The Children's Commissioner role exists to protect and promote the rights of children, to take children's voices to the heart of Government, to Parliament, and to the leaders of public service to ensure that they understand what children want and need. The role has been in place for 20 years and is embedded in the Children's Act. I believe Lord Laming, and others who were involved in the inception of this role after the terrible death of Victoria Climbié, are here today, which is a matter of great pride for me.
The Chair: I wanted to start with your views on the pathfinders, which are a critical part of the Government's response. What do you think of them, and is that a good approach? Do you think the Government are putting the right steps in place to evaluate what goes on in the pathfinders?
Dame Rachel de Souza: I absolutely agree with the Government that we need serious reform of children's social care. Everybody probably agrees with that. However, just to make clear, pathfinders are only one small part of children's social care reform. What we also need to be thinking about is radical improvement across the entire country. I do not think you need me to point out that more than 50% of children's social care in local authority areas either requires improvement or is even worse than that. Our reform objective should be to make sure that every child is in a good or better authority. How do we go about that?
Sometimes we approach children's social care as if it is too hard, too difficult. Actually, the same things that we have done in other areas of public service need to be done in children's social care, around accountability, having a fantastic vision and, in particular, putting children at the centre. How can children in receipt of children's social care thrive and how can we match their ambitions as well? I just wanted to say that first, so that you have a sense of the fact that, even though pathfinders are important, we need to be doing an awful lot more.
On the pathfinders, there are some excellent proposals, but I would rather they were more ubiquitous and wider spread and that there were more of them. I am very concerned that they are properly joined up as well. What I hear from directors of children's services and others is that they want to get on with it now. We need to rocket boost pathfinders. We have some really good people working on the evaluations, there is a rich evidence base already in children’s social care and What Works Centres and others are going to have lots to say. My view is, let us get on with it because if you are a child, two years is too long to wait. It is not good enough to have children receiving inadequate, non-joined-up services.
The Chair: Interestingly, other evidence we have had has echoed what you have just said; that we know what works, and we could be getting on with spreading it around the country. That makes me unsure as to what the pathfinders are meant to be doing. Originally, I thought they were testing innovations or testing approaches, but everyone is telling us there are things that have been proven to work that we are not doing everywhere. Can you say a bit about whether the pathfinders are innovating or testing something, or is it testing how you implement things at a bigger level? Or is it just because there is not enough money?
Dame Rachel de Souza: Probably both of the latter two or a certain caution. There are different kinds of pathfinders. Some of them are working with other services. Some of them are working on particular things. They are trying to take all the things we think are good and need to happen from the care review, like early family help, and to start moving and testing them again.
My challenge would be: we know a lot of this already so let us get going. I am hearing that from the ground, from directors of children's services, who are saying, “Do not leave us out, what is going to improve us?” My background is as a teacher and head teacher for 31 years, and I have been part of one of the most exciting and successful reform stories in the public sector. We have to make sure that our focus is on the areas that are not good enough and working well enough. That is where we need to be moving and moving quickly. Pathfinders are great, but there have been innovation programs in the DfE in children's social care for a long time. We know lots of things that work. We know what we want to do in the care review. Let us get on with it.
The Chair: When you say let us get going right across the country because we know what works, are you thinking, as we used to say in school, ‘Get the basics in place throughout the country,’ or are you actually saying that all the proposals in Josh MacAlister’s report, in full, could go right across the country within the timeframe that he indicated was necessary?
Dame Rachel de Souza: There are an awful lot of good things in Josh MacAlister’s report that I would like to see happen, for example, the focus on kinship care, the focus on early family help. A lot of those have been tested already. We have seen family hubs, family centres and lots of things that are already in place. I actually want to say something more. We need a shared outcomes framework across all services for children. We need to know what is actually happening and we need join up across services to be able to do that. We need proper accountability. We need to bring everything we know from the last 15 years of public sector reform from different areas into play and not be put off by the ‘It’s too hard,’ language that we have heard too much. At the start of a major reform program, we need to strengthen the department for children's social care in the DfE as well. Compared to the education team that led reform, the Department for Education’s team on children's social care is tiny. I have been really surprised by that, given the amount of need in terms of children’s social care.
There is lots to do, and we should be going way beyond Josh MacAlister’s very good reforms. In education, you would not just look at phonics. We need a thorough accountability moving forward.
The Chair: Do you think there is an outcome framework in place in the department, or do you think that is work to be done?
Dame Rachel de Souza: We do not know what is happening with the inputs; we do not know the outputs. There is not even agreement on what has been measured. I did an independent family review for government that I reported on just before Christmas, and I produced the basis of an outcomes framework in that family review. A number of departments across government at the moment have formed a group to look at that. There is a commitment to create an outcomes framework, but the trouble is that the Ofsted framework is not the same as an outcomes framework. The tail should not wag the dog. We need to be asking how we are going to measure this. Is it numbers of children referred? Is it children's educational outcomes? Is it attendance at school? We need to be clear about how we want to measure that fantastic vision for every child to have a loving, relational experience and all those good things.
Lord Shipley: Can you explain a little more about a figure you gave us a moment ago, which was that 50% of children's care services were categorised as requiring improvement, or worse. Is this because they are failing on one thing but everything else is all right, which is a criticism of Ofsted?
Dame Rachel de Souza: No.
Lord Shipley: Or is it a lack of money and are not in a position to do it anyway?
Dame Rachel de Souza: I have not read every single inspection report, although I do read them as they come in. Before I comment on the whole country, I would say that I have seen outstanding children's social care in some areas. For example, I have spent a bit of time in Leeds, and I was down in Kent looking at the Kent reception centre. Kent is outstanding, so there are models. Sunderland has made an amazing journey to ‘outstanding’ in a really short time.
There are children's social care areas that are outstanding, but that percentage I gave you is the 2021 figure of ‘requires improvement or inadequate’ local authorities in the country. Unfortunately, there are some areas that really are struggling. I am pleased that you are challenging me about it because if I came to you and said, ‘50% of schools require improvement or worse,’ there would be a national outcry. That is my concern. Some people would say, ‘Well, Ofsted is measuring the wrong things; let’s look at that.’ I do not think they are. They are the best thing we have at the moment to make a judgment. There might be money issues. There might be practice issues. I have seen far too many areas that have been inadequate for too long.
When we hear about child deaths, I go and check how long the area has been inadequate and it is often worryingly long, which is why we need this reform program. It is actually why I became Children's Commissioner. I was working in schools and felt that, in many ways, education had got to the point where it was doing as much as it could—it was doing really well—but I was seeing children who needed the services around them so they could actually engage properly with education, whether those services were directly from children's social care, mental health or elsewhere. I wanted to bring a bit of that reform spirit into children's social care, so it was a good time for me to take the role.
Baroness Bertin: I just wanted to come in on your point about Kent and Sunderland doing a great job. Is there a mechanism for other local authorities to see what ‘good’ looks like?
Dame Rachel de Souza: That is a great question. There is good sharing of practice, and some areas are very generous indeed. I know Leeds are not only sharing their model but also sharing leaders and developing leaders. Some of the innovations I have been looking at are about developing the next generation of DCSs by incubating them through our best areas, mentoring them and sharing them. It is those sorts of things that are going to bring about change, and we know that from other public service reforms.
Baroness Bertin: Is technology playing a part in this, or not?
Dame Rachel de Souza: In terms of data?
Baroness Bertin: Yes, but also in all aspects of our lives, technology is changing the way we operate, and I wondered if that was the case in this area.
Dame Rachel de Souza: We are seeing some really good use of technology proposed, for example, in the new family hubs where we can go online 24/7.
I need to be careful what I say, but one of the things I get concerned about is poor data collection. The sharing of data about children across services needs to be better. I have been arguing strongly for about 16 months that we should have a unique identifier to improve attendance and support for the most vulnerable children. Children's social care leaders often say to me, ‘We cannot work with health.’ If we had a unique identifier—perhaps the NHS number for every child—then we would not have to be retelling those stories. We would know what the inputs were, and we would be able to judge them against a proper outcomes framework.
Baroness Bertin: That sounds like a very interesting development.
Dame Rachel de Souza: It would not be hard to do.
The Chair: Can we not we use the one that schools use?
Dame Rachel de Souza: One of the problems is that children have different numbers for different services. They have a pupil number, which is a unique number, they have an NHS number and they have a police number. When I am searching for children missing from education, for example, the numbers do not talk to each other. A GP might be seeing a child, but children's social care and education might not. Joining these up should absolutely be the centre of these reforms.
The Chair: Lord Carter, do you want to come in on that one?
Lord Carter of Coles: There is no single view of the child?
Dame Rachel de Souza: Exactly.
Lord Carter of Coles: There is no single piece of data in this world of joined-up data and nobody has done it locally or anything?
Dame Rachel de Souza: Some areas are trialling local models. There are always innovators doing good practice, it is there, but I have worked hard with Education Ministers to try to persuade them that this is a very good thing, and it is back on the agenda again. I do not think there is a problem with laws around data sharing and GDPR because it is done for the benefit of the child.
I went to Bedfordshire Police to look at their Violence Reduction Unit and they showed me a spreadsheet of children they had come across that were not on any GP’s record and did not seem to have a school number, which convinced me that we need to join services up nationally. It is not that hard to do. It is not about clunky new systems; it is simply an agreement around data sharing and how we do it and what number we use. That infrastructure should be the number one thing. It sounds a bit boring but, if we do not do that, how can we judge an outcomes framework?
Lord Porter of Spalding: The number is easy, though. For all our working lives, we are going to end up with a National Insurance number, so why do we not give it to a kid when it is born?
Lord Carter of Coles: They are allocated but not given out.
Lord Porter of Spalding: We should say, ‘There, that is your first birthday present: your National Insurance number—crack on.’
The Chair: We are going to bring up the issue of the identity card if we carry on this way.
Dame Rachel de Souza: It could help keep children safe as well. That is really important.
Lord Prentis of Leeds: It seems so obvious that that is a good way forward. You talk about sharing best practice and you name a number of authorities. Surely you have put this to the DfE or the Local Government Association? Why has it not been adopted?
Dame Rachel de Souza: There are different answers to different things. There are schemes to train DCSs. There is sharing of good practice. Leeds, for example, is supporting Kirklees, and there are lots of informal arrangements as well. What I would say is that there are not enough, they are not moving fast enough and the ambition is not big enough. I do put that to everyone. I am on the national implementation board and probably a thorn in everyone's side. Unfortunately, because of ministerial change, we only met twice before the implementation paper was published. I am hopeful we will be able to tackle some of these things as we go forward in the implementation period. Everyone on that board is ambitious and there is a Minister who seems very committed to the area, but we have to move quickly.
I know how hard it was to reform education. I was right there in one of Tony Blair's first sponsored academies in 2005. We made all the mistakes but did good things too. There is so much that we can learn from, but there needs to be proper commitment and ambition. We cannot keep saying ‘It is too hard.’
The Chair: Before we go on to the next question, Lord Willis, you need to let us hear you. Thank you.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough: Sometimes it is better if you do not hear me.
This issue of the single number per child is not something new. If you go back to the 2003-04 reform Every Child Matters and look at when that was removed around 2011-12, these issues were discussed in detail there.
The reality is that you have security around information which goes through different organisations—be that social services, schools, the police or elsewhere—and the ability to get access to all that information around a particular number is, in fact, a very difficult thing which successive Governments have not managed to sort out.
I would really like to ask the commissioner how she would resolve that data security which surrounds information which is incredibly precious and very important and often determines criminality? How does she determine she will do that and yet preserve that integrity of the data?
Dame Rachel de Souza: That is a really good challenge. I first became a head teacher back in the day when we started to do those things with Every Child Matters, so I do remember that time. I have talked to the Information Commissioner, who is concerned to protect children's rights and privacy, but we have shown that where there are those outstanding local areas actually doing this and sharing information, they have worked through how to do it well.
The problems of privacy and safeguarding that information are not the barrier. The barrier is more siloed government departments and how they work quite differently. The NHS is very keen on this and others I have talked to are very keen on it, but we need to persuade education.
Q19 Baroness Bertin: If we could move on to the voice of young people, which you have mentioned in one of your previous answers and which you clearly are passionate about and is very important, what more could be done to ensure that their voices are heard, and also that families are listened to, perhaps particularly in the context of the kinship care strategy and advocacy? Do you think the advocacy services are doing their job well with our children?
Dame Rachel de Souza: Unsurprisingly, I absolutely think children's voices are central to this, because children do not see themselves as service users who might have mental health needs and have a mother with a drug problem or whatever.
We talked to children in care. I did the Big Ask survey, which got half a million responses from children around this country, from every local authority, from Gypsy Roma and every ethnic group, from children in mental health as we surveyed children in Young Offender Institutions. We got the same response from all of them about what the barriers are to them thriving and what they want for their futures. Children in care absolutely want the same as every other child, which is, in the main, a happy, loving home, great options at education and things to do and, for their futures, a great job and success. They want to create a life.
It is really important we listen to them in the design of these reforms and use their language. Last year, I did my family review, and we did nationally representative surveys of families right across this country—parents, grandparents, adults and children. Their biggest concerns were cost of living and the cost of childcare.
The first thing they told me they care about the most in the world was family. They think family is important because of love and because these are the people who have your back. In that report, for the first time, we showed the protective effect of family, that whatever income decile you are in, if you can rely on your family, your wellbeing is higher as an adult. These things are really important.
Where do individuals turn when they are in trouble? They told us the first place they turn to is their family and then to their friends. When they engage with services, they want services to feel familial and local. That is why I have supported the family hubs movement, and I support a lot in this care review, because it is talking about relationships. It is talking about local sustained relationships that are about people, not about problems.
Seeking the views of children to inform these reforms is really important. I am helping the DfE, which has asked for advice to set up its own kind of children in care and care leavers’ group. I have my own, I am constantly seeking children's views and it is really important. We put them at the heart of these reforms.
Baroness Bertin: Thank you for that very full answer. Can I just push you a bit on kinship care? I sat on a committee looking at post-legislative scrutiny of the Children and Families Act 2014, and that wider familial support got rather forgotten about in that piece of legislation, which is obviously a big error. Could you talk a little more about how that is feeding into the reforms?
Dame Rachel de Souza: I totally agree with what you said. I have just said in a different way that, actually, children do so much better if they are cared for by someone in their family, as long as that is safe. We need to ensure we support family members to be able to provide kinship care. There are lots of ways we can do this in a practical way. My office is just putting kinship leave into place at the moment, in the same way you would have adoption leave.
We need to have those family meetings that assess what members of families might need to look after children, often it is something as simple as bunk beds that they cannot afford to pay for. Just from the efficiency side, imagine if what you are paying for is a few things that the uncle of that child needs to be able to take them on and look after them properly; it is so much cheaper than taking a child into care, and the outcomes are going to be so much better for the child.
Kinship care is very much on the agenda of the implementation board. We now need to make it practical and work out how to operationalise it in local authority areas, because there are all the rules about what you can and cannot get money for. This is financially, morally, and personally better for children if we can make it work. Now we need to underpin it with systems and LAs that actually mean that it can be financially supported. Often it is not as much as people think, and it is a lot less than full-time care.
Lord Carter of Coles: Good afternoon. My question is going to be about collaboration, but before that, I just wonder if you could offer the committee any insight into inputs in terms of financial resources and outcomes? In your experience, are there people who are, in this time of very scarce resources, really making the most of them and doing brilliant jobs, and is there a correlation? People keep talking about money; is it just money, or is it good management?
Dame Rachel de Souza: That is a good question. If you were asking me about education, I could answer that one easily for you. In terms of children's social care, I found it difficult to really understand and get to the bottom of the answer to that question, although I do constantly ask it.
One of the areas I am really interested in—and I do not want us to go down a rabbit hole, but just looking at the provision for the big report from the Competitions and Market Authority—is the provision of private children's homes and places. About 80% of children's homes are private now, and given that there is that figure, there really is a role that they are not just going to go away—as much as I would like to bring more not-for-profit; frankly, I would rather be developing fostering so no child has to live in an institution—but one of the things that seems to cause the greatest consternation is the high costs of individual children's placements.
I am often with the president of the family court talking about children who are deprived of their liberty, and the day-to-day costs of that. This is one place the Government could really help because, frankly, if you have quite sophisticated private businesses and you are negotiating places for children, often it seems to be done in not as planned a way as I want. There could be a role for supporting local authorities with really strong strategic financial management and deal-making.
If they are going to be in a market, how can a DCS do that? As someone in the school sector who, as a young head, suddenly had to take on £30 million to build a school and had a £50 million budget for my 14 schools, I put a board of trustees around me who were exceptional at financial strategic matters, so I could get on with education and they could look at that. There could be some support there for local authorities to do that. Some do it very well, though I would rather see us move to something and if it is going to be a quasi-market, a quasi-market of not-for-profit, because it just does not sit well with me that children's social care and children's families are in this profit-making business.
I worry about whether there are enough skills in financial strategy, strategic planning, and even deal-making. There is a lot of money going into children's social care, and yet the cost seems to be immensely high going out the other side. You can read the CMA reports, but I feel quite concerned about that.
Lord Bach: I was a police and crime commissioner for five years, and if there is one thing that stays with me now, it is the fact that so many young lawbreakers, particularly serious lawbreakers, are young people who have been in care. This is fairly specific; often in children’s homes—of course, sometimes in those who have been through other types of care—and it seems to be a lasting problem, one that does not seem to be going away.
I do not want to be forward at all in any way, but it would seem to me that an absolutely crucial part of your job is making sure government actually makes an effort to tackle what is so obvious. Kids who have been in care are much more likely to end up not in minor trouble but in serious trouble. Surely, it is the duty of government to try to stop that. What is your thinking on this, and how much of it is a priority for you? You have a huge range of things to deal with in your job, but it does seem to me to be a fundamental societal point and one that sticks with me. What is your view?
Dame Rachel de Souza: Children are in care because they have either been abused or seriously neglected. It is a very high bar and a very serious thing. You have been let down incredibly badly. The state is then the corporate parent—and I know we might be talking about corporate parenting later—so everything we would do for our own children, we should do for these children. It is as simple as that.
The questions I ask myself every single day are: are we doing enough? What more can we do? How can we make this work for these individual children? I go out and see them; I talk to them; we think about them all the time. One of the things I am very keen on is we have to get children out of institutions and get them into the best foster care, kinship care or, if it has to be a children's home, a home that is not a focus of criminal gangs and exploitation.
We have to keep them near home where they are cared for by their local authority corporate parent. If you send them 200 miles up the road to somewhere they do not know, where we have not sorted out their school places, their mental health support and they are just being looked after, they are going to be in some building that is a care home, so of course they are going to be the focus of gangs and exploitation.
I will give you an example. We went to visit a children's home recently, and I looked on the wall and we saw that there was a rota for the teenage girls, and the rota included things like getting your nails done and a range of activities. I said, ‘They are meant to be at school,’ and the answer was, ‘Well, they do not go to school because they get picked up by criminal gangs on the way to school.’ I said, ‘Well, walk them to school then!’
We have to think about children in care like we would our own. Their education, the support we put in for them, the safeguarding, the living in safe places are all critical. Yes, I want to see kinship care, but mainly I want to see a really developed foster care so we can actually have children living with individuals who care for them in the most home-like, safe environment which seems like—if not their own family—the nearest thing to a family, so these issues do not arise.
Lord Bach: That is great, and we absolutely agree with that. It is marvellous that that is your view, but what are you doing to persuade government that this is a priority and not something that we can just live with for another 20 years? Are you having any success?
Dame Rachel de Souza: I have been in the role for 16 months; I meet the Secretary of State every six weeks and I meet the Children's Minister every six weeks. I try to advise them, come up with solutions and challenge them. I have written a number of papers. I particularly look for evidence that can show the reality of a situation in order for the right solution to be found.
I recently did a major piece of work on siblings being separated, which had never been done. Some 20,000 children are living as separated siblings, and I was able to show that to the Minister and say we need to make sure we have enough provision. There are only 800 foster carers in the country who can take large families, so we need to develop more families.
There is something about providing great evidence, providing children's voices, and using my influence with Ministers to try to get change. Unfortunately, with the care review, we had a lot of ministerial change. A great example would be, when I came into post, I was shown a copy of the SEND Green Paper. I sat with the Secretary of State, and I said, ‘You cannot publish this. I will not support it. It is not good enough. You have to go back to the drawing board.’ We had a number of sessions to go through it, and, to his absolute credit, he listened. It caused terrible trouble, but he gathered his officials and we went back to the drawing board with a new talented team and we have ended up with a far better SEND Green Paper, albeit with a delay.
Unfortunately, we had had a lot of ministerial change, and so we have only just got going on it, but believe me, there is no holding me back when I think something is right. In our Secretary of State for Education and in our Children's Minister, we have two very committed women who are really keen on trying to get this right. I need to make sure that they are hearing the right things because I am afraid of how the Civil Service officials are often somewhat removed from the reality of day-to-day. Gillian and Claire are very passionate about this, and I am talking to them every few weeks.
Q20 Lord Carter of Coles: For many years, most of us have aspired to joined-up government, and it is extremely hard to deliver. But, in this case, given where we are, do you think the leaders of children's care services have the right levers to ensure other public services can work to deliver the agenda to children and families?
Dame Rachel de Souza: We have started to formulate an answer to that question about data in our recent discussions. I agree with you. Coming to work in Westminster, one of the things I have been most surprised about is just how siloed things are.
I work with fantastic Cabinet Ministers and teams across the different departments, but I find supporting families is over in DLUHC, we have DWP with some other things, Health doing something else, and that join-up is really tricky and we need to do it, even more so when it goes down to the local authority areas. If we are going to succeed in reforming children's social care, it needs to be everyone—all the services. You cannot make children's social care better if you are not dealing with the mental health problems of Mum, the health problems of disabled children and, where I am currently very focused, our asylum-seeker children.
I was talking to Minister Jenrick this morning about corporate parenting and how at the Kent reception centre that is run by the LA, although it is not so glamorous—it is not like the hotels in some ways—the service the kids are getting is so much better. They are getting education and safeguarding support, whereas in the hotels, the Home Office do not know how to do that. They do not know how to look after the kids. We need join-up of the services.
Lord Carter of Coles: Would extending corporate parenting to the wider public sector do that? Would you be in favour of that?
Dame Rachel de Souza: That sounds great. One of the things I say a lot is that all of us in government are the corporate parent of children in care. However, it needs to really be spelled out what that means in the other services, and it needs to not mean children's social care will not then deliver their function.
Just to go back to those asylum-seeking children: when I look at Kent local authority—an outstanding local authority running their reception centre for asylum seeker children—I can see excellent safeguarding and high-level professionals. There are interpreters and the head teachers’ charity who teach them English four mornings a week.
When I look at the hotels, I see fantastic professionals from the Home Office. They want to do well, but they do not know how. There is no education. They do not know how to keep the children safe, and that is why children's social care and corporate parenting need to be sat with children's social care, but we need to work with other services, bring them in, share information, and make sure we are working together. Children's social care cannot solve it on their own, but there needs to be a place where the responsibility sits.
Lord Prentis of Leeds: Could I just follow that through? It makes sense having the comprehensive approach and people working together—different functions, different departments. Who manages it? Because one of the arguments against is that that type of system is unmanageable.
Dame Rachel de Souza: Yes, and it is one of my biggest worries. I have to read all the serious case reviews. I am the person who is sitting on ‘Andrew Marr’ when there is a child death and I have seen multi-agency working not work again. I am the one who reads all the recommendations of the reviews, and they all say ‘Multi-agency working, a shared approach’, and, yet again, it has not happened on the ground.
That is why I am interested in the building blocks of how we do it, not just the intention to do it. That is why things like the data systems are having very clear systems, procedures and responsibilities for how things should work, and not just relationships. Relationships are really important, and relationships make it work, but it is not enough just to say, ‘We want to do it' or, ‘This is a good thing.’
Building that is a huge job but it needs to be done. If you go back 20 years, look at the Munro review and all the recommendations. It is multi-agency working, working together that was needed and yet there are still those child deaths, those issues, and we realise it did not work. We have to build it from the ground up which is why I have this sense of urgency, pace, funding—used well—and some real clarity on the technical side and how we do it.
The Chair: I want to take that a bit further and reflect on something you said earlier. You are absolutely right, our ability to join across streams of work is not very good at all, and it is even worse in Whitehall than it is elsewhere. When you were asked about value for money, you said you could answer that question for schools. I understand that entirely. One of the differences, for good or bad, is that schools live in the DfE—they always have. They have never been split across government departments, so you have always known where the lead department was and because of that, we have what we might call a national school system.
Do you think we have a national children's social care system, or does the fragmentation in Whitehall mean that, at delivery level, it is not a national service, and that is partly why you cannot answer the question whether it is value for money, because you are not comparing like things in each authority, whereas in schools you are absolutely comparing similar things because we have a national school service?
Dame Rachel de Souza: I really do recognise what you are saying, and just to support that, from the education perspective, we have been to every single YOI. I have just published a report on YOI today. One of the things we did was go to every youth prison over the weekend and actually see what children's experiences were, and we have republished a report on that.
I also looked at the education service delivered to children, and because it is being split up from the DfE, it is really not good enough, and I have no qualms in saying that. That plays to your point about ownership. For the main, children's social care does sit in the Department for Education. We could and should be thinking about joining the other elements together with it more closely. I would love to see children's social care and children and families be a reality in one department and everything brought together, but it also needs the Government, the political focus.
I have been really spoilt by being at the forefront of a reform movement that was a political priority, and if the Government focus on children's social care, it is going to get better. We need it to have that laser-like focus and leadership that education has had—which I have had the privilege of experiencing—and then we will be able to move mountains.
The Chair: If you are a migrant child or if you are in a youth offender institute, the DfE is not the most important government department in your life, is it? It is the Home Office or the criminal justice system, whom you have said are not good with children. The question is: is there a danger that this becomes a DfE strategy and not a government strategy?
Dame Rachel de Souza: There is a delivery answer, but it needs to be delivered in a coherent way. Children's social care cannot be separated from special educational needs and disabilities and health. There is join-up needed, but a genuine vision with great leadership at government level can bring all this together. We have done it in different ways. We have done it in the past by having a target that everyone is committed to and held to account to, to bring them across the government departments. There are ways of doing it, but we need to look hard at where we have put some of vulnerable children. I have said it about five times now, but I would be very concerned at the Home Office being corporate parent for asylum-seeker children because they just do not have the safeguarding experience of working with children. I do think we need to look harder.
Q21 Lord Bach: Perhaps predictably, there have been differences of view about the proposal for the introduction of regional care co-operatives. How far would their introduction address your concerns about how local authorities plan and deliver young people's care services? We have heard both views in this short inquiry as to their value or the opposite. What is your view?
Dame Rachel de Souza: Given the diversity in providers of children’s social care, for example, I have talked about the need for high-level financial and strategic planning skills which would play to working regionally. However, for me, it is the child and the family at the centre. Children and families live in places, and these places are in local authorities, and the local authorities are the corporate parent. My only worry about the regional co-operatives is that the people who are the corporate parent of the child need to make sure that they have that child in their area, and my worry about the regional is that they will end up far away from home.
I do think it would be useful. When I look at specialist provision, regional co-operatives make absolute sense. I am still reeling from the private residential settings in Doncaster, run by the Hesley Group, where the children with severe disabilities faced terrible abuse. Looking at who delivers those specialist care services could well be done regionally, or even nationally, so that we can do that in a coherent way.
With the regional, it makes sense financially, and it makes sense on a map if this is how we are organising education and social care regions, but I do not want us to move too far away from the director of children’s services as corporate parent and feeling a personal responsibility to that child, and making sure they have that sense of knowing where they are and are thriving. Some of the best DCSs will talk to university vice-chancellors when they get children who have been in their care and advocate for them, like a parent would. We must not lose that.
Lord Bach: Thank you. Just as a supplementary to that, what other approaches, apart from the one we have just discussed, could improve local authority planning and the delivery of children's care services? You have mentioned some of them already, but if we were not to have regional care co-operatives or they would only play a small part, what would you emphasise as part of the new system?
Dame Rachel de Souza: In terms of the planning system, I see far too much crisis planning. We could talk about innovations and what could work. When I ran 14 schools, I would be thinking about my three-year budget, planning ahead and how many children I had. I know it is harder in children's social care, but whatever model we do, we need to start planning for the long term and really predicting and planning the right provision. A lot of that is that joined-up work of looking at ‘How many children am I going to have who cannot live at home because their disability is so serious How many children now are coming into care? What is happening?’
I know DCSs have to deal with their chief executives, and it is difficult as some chief executives are better at this than others, but it is absolutely essential. The DfE should absolutely be demanding a proper long-term strategy that they need to get behind in terms of financing it, and that is when the innovation can happen.
How can we rocket-boost foster care? Do we need specialist foster care for asylum seekers? I cannot tell you how many DCSs say to me, ‘I have so many asylum seekers, what am I going to do?’ What about developing a cadre of foster carers with a very specialist provision who want 15 and 16-year-olds? We should allow some freedom for DCSs to come up with ideas for the solutions for their particular areas, so it does not just become a crisis capacity issue. That is where we are now; there is a crisis in the system about capacity of places.
We need to look at this in the long term and let areas develop the innovation. In schools, I would look at, for example, Norfolk and Suffolk where I had a trust. Only 100 people are doing physics A-level when there are 15,000 sixth-formers, but we have the energy industry off the coast, and we have science parks, so let us create a maths and science school.
We need our children's social care to be able to innovate in that way. Who do we have who can support and what kind of things could we do that were different? How can we create a different model that ties in local business and local people to create something really special for these children? It is those kinds of things.
The Chair: You have mentioned foster care again, and you have mentioned it quite favourably quite a few times during your contributions. Do you think it is really good quality across the board, or are you saying it is a good idea but the quality needs to be improved? What do you think of the quality of foster care as it is delivered at the moment, not necessarily as a concept?
Dame Rachel de Souza: In my Big Ask response, we had about 6,000 children who were living in care. I hear so many stories of children in foster care who are having a great experience but too many who are not. I can tell you that children know when they are cared for and when they are not.
I also hear from people who want to be, or have become, foster carers. Let me just give you one example. A very senior civil servant in the area of SEND, who was very experienced with safeguarding, tried to be a foster carer in a London borough. He was married, had his own little children, and wanted children from seriously drug-addicted parents to look after for that first year before they were adopted. He knew exactly what he wanted. When he went through the process of trying to become a foster carer, he was looked at with suspicion. He had a terrible time. Eventually, he got accepted. He was the only person in that London borough accepted as a foster carer that year.
We are not doing enough to allow the people who want to be foster carers to do it. Look at this nation with the Ukraine situation: hearts and doors have been opened, and we have had the John Lewis advert. Everyone was saying, ‘We want to do it.’ I am not saying anyone should do it, but I do think we are not pushing hard enough to actually support people who really want to be foster carers, and, in the main, children are better off in a home-like environment rather than in an institution. We need to rocket-boost foster caring.
Lord Shipley: You talked earlier about placements a long way from home. Can that problem be solved? In other words, is it something that is a desirable objective but is actually going to be very hard to do?
Dame Rachel de Souza: One of the problems is that it often happens because of crisis planning. The director of children's services has to make a decision as they do not have anywhere for a child to go and the only place is up in the north-east and they are based in Harrow or somewhere.
One of the best things about the care review is trying to make everybody think about early intervention and the long term, and turn around the financial situation from always dealing with very expensive crises to longer-term planning. Doing that flip is going to be difficult and will need supporting, but actually, if our directors of children's services and chief execs were looking at a long-term plan and planning for sufficiency in a more sustained way, they would have a much better chance at it.
It is always going to be difficult in very expensive inner-city areas because sufficiency is always going to be problematic, but that is where I would be encouraging the not-for-profits and charitable partnerships, where property was perhaps held in a way that would not be unaffordable in another way. I do think a longer-term plan could solve the problem. We should not be sending children 200 miles away from home. We just should not.
Lord Prentis of Leeds: You say it is a long-term plan, and it is probably a euphemism for saying we need more care homes and more funding. Would you agree?
Dame Rachel de Souza: We need to try to achieve the ambition of the care review to focus on early family. The ambition of the care review is to stop spending so much on the crisis end and to really focus on kinship, early family help, and nipping problems in the bud, which would mean that actually spending the money in a wise way could actually meet needs longer-term. But I do not underestimate how difficult that task is, and I do think it will need financial support to do it well.
I have not really seen any convincing figures anywhere about how much that would cost. As an academy trust chief exec and a head teacher, I am used to knowing how much every pencil costs, and I have just seen high-level figures about how to do this and I am not convinced. I would like to see a lot more detail on how the aims of the care review can achieve what we have been talking about. Hopefully that is going to come.
Lord Carter of Coles: Do we have any sense of the average cost per child in care nationally, and regional differences?
Dame Rachel de Souza: We should do, but I would have to write to you about it. I do not have it at the top of my head.
Lord Carter of Coles: When you write to us, could you give us any guidance where to look internationally? I do not know whether you could say that; are there other countries who have achieved joining up?
Dame Rachel de Souza: I do have a few ideas, so I will write to you.
Lord Carter of Coles: Thank you.
The Chair: Lord Willis, do you have the next question?
Q22 Lord Willis of Knaresborough: Thank you very much. Can I just say how much I have enjoyed this session and how much I admire the sheer desire on your part to actually solve some of these questions?
Very early on, I was just a little concerned that you seem to dismiss the MacAlister review in favour of your own solution of outcome frameworks. I am concerned about that because, as a committee, we actually enjoyed talking to MacAlister. We enjoyed reading his review, and we were also rather pleased that the government strategy seemed to reflect a great deal of what MacAlister was saying, and here you come along and say, ‘Forget that. Outcome frameworks are what we want.’
My first question to you is: what are the barriers on the ground to implementing the government strategy, and how should the Government overcome them if it is not going to take a lot of notice of MacAlister?
Dame Rachel de Souza: First of all, I did not mean to come over as dismissive. There is so much in Josh's review that is good, and I hope that throughout the session I have spelled that out. There are a lot of good ideas in Josh’s review, like the work on kinship, the work on early family help, things around outcomes framework—it is a very good review.
I was trying to say that, having been involved in public sector reform myself, there were wider things I felt needed to happen if we were going to really reform the whole sector as well. Absolutely, the pathfinders need to happen, and I have published a response saying everything that is good and what I think needs to happen following the care review.
I am not in any way dismissing it. To answer your question directly, I just think it is great to join up across all the services. That needs to happen if that is the government strategy for the care review. As you know, the implementation plan is going to happen as it stands, and the data side of that, the outcomes framework as well, and all of those alluded to are in there.
I do also think I have quite a strong view about accountability and improvement of services, and that much could be done. The care review is great in terms of the detail of how social workers can work, a commitment to kinship care, a commitment to relations, all of that, whereas I am thinking at the level up—at the government level, at the level where we are holding local authorities to account for provision—there is still some work to do around how to do that, and they were the comments I was trying to make.
It was really an answer to your question about what the other levers are, how to make the change happen, and I hope I have answered that.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough: Thank you. Before I came today, I did go back to look at the Every Child Matters programme because I was active as a head teacher before I came in into Parliament, and I actually thought it was such a good idea, something which would make a very profound difference.
Reading about the Government in 2011 when they discontinued it, I was very struck by what one of the Ministers said: that we did not focus early enough on the distinctive role of social care within the joined-up system. Today, you have spoken a lot about education—and I understand that as you have a brilliant background in that area—but, in terms of social work, that really is an issue that is coming out through this inquiry.
The great weakness is that for the children who have the greatest needs, it is probably not their education, but it is in fact their need to get high-quality social care integrated into the system that should be the leader. The Chair mentioned this very strongly earlier. What specific action is the strategy missing which would actually support children in care, and indeed those that are desperately in need of high-quality social work?
Dame Rachel de Souza: I can only agree with you on some of those principles around the Every Child Matters strategy. I have talked a lot about how education can only do so much, and I have published a number of pieces recently and hopefully given some evidence-based answers to this about how we really need social care to be able to wrap around schools to meet the needs of their children, which is what Every Child Matters was doing.
I do think a successful education for every child in social care is one of the outcomes that we should be ambitious for. When I look at the educational outcomes of children with a social worker or children in care, they are absolutely appalling. We have to have a bit of righteous anger about that and ensure that the services—whether it is mental health services, health services, children's social care, social workers—are working hand in glove around education to deliver.
In fact, I am really excited by the family hub model, and with falling rolls, getting those family hubs on to school sites. When I did my family review, do you know what the two places that families trust are? School and GP. We need to harness that, and that is why you bringing up the Every Child Matters strategy is something that has legs. We can and should do it in a new way, learn from what we did and do better.
Recently I visited a huge number of secure mental-health wards and people working with children with disabilities, I have been out and about and been everywhere. We really need an excellent workforce strategy, and we need to be supporting and thinking hard about how we can encourage, support and encourage recruitment into the social work area. Again, in the care review, Josh has a lot of positives to say about that, but it has to be a priority, and it is difficult coming out of lockdown.
Lord Prentis of Leeds: This is about social care in general, not just child social care, and it is not me saying it—it is the King's Fund. I was just reading a briefing about the crisis in social care and the lack of any workforce planning for the future. We have heard in this committee about haemorrhaging social workers as well. You have not really raised the workforce issues, especially on corporate care, but really, you have to look at the reality of where the workforce is, along with the plans for the future, otherwise they will not succeed. What do you do in the immediate term?
Dame Rachel de Souza: Absolutely. Again, it has been interesting for me to visit lots of local authority areas including those that are considered to be really good. One of the things I see in the places I consider to be the best is real stability in their social worker workforce. Let me give Leeds as an example, because that is one that people are probably quite familiar with. When you look at staff turnover in Leeds, social work turnover is very low. They have a high level of trust there, they have done away with thresholds, they have really positive professional relationships between managers, social workers, and early family help workers and a fantastic CPD plan. They have everything I would expect to see in an outstanding organisation in terms of the workforce, so what happens is people drive miles to be a social worker and they stay there, and it is invested in, whereas places just next door cannot retain staff. So whilst I do accept your points about funding of social care and all those wider things, one of the reasons I wanted to focus on DCSs’ leadership and how we lead social care in areas is because it makes a massive difference to the people who work there.
Social work is hard wherever you are, but if you are working in an environment where you feel supported, where your professional development is supported, where you feel trust and you feel that your senior managers are listening to you and they will back you, then social workers are going to stay. That is what I have seen in these places. But we do need to invest in the workforce, there is no question about that.
Lord Shipley: Two years ago, I chaired the Select Committee on Youth Unemployment. One of our recommendations was that there should be a young person's commissioner between the ages of 16 and 24, and—putting aside the issue of age 16 to 18, because your responsibilities go to the age of 18—the reason we did that was that there seemed to be a gap for young people coming out of care, young people in the criminal justice system and young people in Traveller communities. Do you have anything we should think about in terms of your remit about the age of 18?
Putting aside whether ours was a good idea or a bad idea—I think it was a good idea—I want to talk about your identifying reasons to join up Whitehall. We found nine Whitehall departments looking after young people's policy issues—that is, 16 to 25; your remit goes to 18. In your view, is there a problem about what happens to those who are outside your purview at the age of 18 onwards?
Dame Rachel de Souza: I have just appointed a care leavers board of 18-pluses to work with me, to advise me on my particular group of children and young people that are the most vulnerable. You make an excellent point that, certainly, 18 to 25 is a key area. There is much we can do in terms of engaging young adults of that age, and younger children as well. When I look at some of the best models around the sector—I have my advisory board; there are superb young people's advisory boards and groups in the NHS, and I was working with them recently—they are listened to and embedded in with the executive.
In the NHS, it is easier in some ways because it is such a monolith and you can work out how to work in it, but there is no reason why every department should not be having both representation of advisory boards of 18-pluses and younger as well. I would like to see that. Getting as many of those voices there as possible is really important, but there is lots that could be done.
The Chair: That probably brings us to the end of the questions. Dame Rachel, we are very grateful for your time. It has been a very interesting session and we have learnt a lot. What has been nice is that it has fitted in topic-wise with some of the sessions we have had already, so we have been able to join those pieces together.
I am sure we all very much hope that in the future we will be able to meet with you again as part of our ongoing work, but, in terms of this inquiry, thank you for being here today, and thank you for what you are doing on behalf of young children. It is much valued.
Dame Rachel de Souza: Thank you very much.
The Chair: This part of our meeting is now closed. Thank you.