28
Examination of witnesses
Eavan Mckay, Jessica Ford and Nicola Smith.
Q26 The Chair: Good morning to the three of you. We have Eavan Mckay from NSPCC, Jessica Ford from Action for Children and Nicola Smith from Barnardo’s. Thank you very much for coming this morning and giving us your time for this second session into our inquiry into looked-after children. This is an oral session that is recorded and is livestreamed on the parliamentary website; you will receive a transcript from today’s session for your correction if necessary.
Would you briefly introduce yourselves more fully, in terms of your roles, the roles of the organisations you represent and your particular interest in this inquiry, which may seem self-evident? Thank you very much. I will start with Eavan.
Eavan Mckay: Hello, everyone, and thank you for having me. I am the policy and public affairs manager at the NSPCC. The NSPCC is the UK’s leading child protection charity. We provide services, programmes and practice frameworks that professionals use and deliver to prevent abuse and neglect. We also operate Childline and the NSPCC Helpline. As our name suggests, we have a major focus on prevention, so I will probably talk a lot from that perspective today. We also commission and conduct research, using that evidence from practice to inform policy and system reform. Thank you for having me.
Jessica Ford: Morning, everyone. I am the policy and research manager at Action for Children. I lead on children’s social care policy with a focus on the care system and child protection. Action for Children is a voluntary sector provider of children’s services in England and across the UK. Our services span the full spectrum of the system, from preventative early help through to care placements and support for children who are leaving care. We do not have statutory child protection roles like the NSPCC does, but we run many edge-of-care-related services.
Nicola Smith: I am a senior policy adviser for children in and leaving care at Barnardo’s. Barnardo’s is one of the oldest children’s charities; much like Action for Children, we are a service delivery partner in the children’s social care system and our work spans the entire care system. We offer a lot of early intervention and edge-of-care work. We are also one of the largest voluntary fostering and adoption agencies. We still operate a small number of residential care homes and we offer services for young people when they leave care. We span the whole of the children’s social care system.
The Chair: Thank you very much for those introductions. We will move straight on into questioning with Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson.
Q27 Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson: Thank you so much for being here with us this morning. I want to start with a big picture question. Our committee has already heard a lot about the extensive issues in the children’s social care system and the challenges faced by children in care. We have also heard about the very poor outcomes regarding educational attainment, mental health difficulties and employment for care-experienced children.
Could you tell us what you think the hallmarks of a good social care system for children in care would look like? What should the system be targeting? What are the benchmarks? What does good look like for this cohort of children?
Nicola Smith: The simple way of viewing this is that these are children of the state: the state becomes their parent and, as their parent, we should want the very best for them. We should have the same aspirations and ideas for these children as parents up and down the country have for their own children.
In terms of how that looks, we really need to address the record numbers of children in the care system. While some children will always need to enter children’s social care and that will always be important, we also need to think that perhaps some children are entering the system because we are not doing enough to support their families earlier on. Can we do more to make sure that all children who can safely stay with their birth families do stay with them? A good social care system would definitely do that.
As I said, when it comes to the children who enter the care system, we are trying to do the same for them as any parent would do for their own children. In that sense, we need to make sure that they are in the right homes, with the right love, with the right care, for the right amount of time and with the right amount of support and opportunities that we would expect. This ensures they are able to participate and achieve in education at similar rates to children who are not in the care system.
When those children become young people and move into adulthood, we must support them at that stage, just as many parents do. When their children get to 18 and they go off to university, their parents are on the end of the phone to support them; we need to do the same for children in the care system. We need to give them that support and what they need to move into adulthood, so that they do not face higher rates of homelessness, higher rates of entry into the criminal justice system or higher rates of suicide and things like that. That is the overall vision as I see it.
Jessica Ford: I really agree with what Nicola said. Broadly speaking, we are on the right track with the reform programme. The Families First model spans the entire spectrum of the system. Obviously, we are looking at providing better support for children to remain safely within their families and whole family support.
From there we move into the kinship space for children who are unable to remain with their families, where there is much better support for kinship arrangements and crucially that they are sustainable over time. We must ensure kinship carers have what they need, so they are not doing this in the face of total adversity because they are committed to caring for the child, but that it actually works for the whole family in that situation.
For children who need to go into care, the Families First model prioritises fostering for the majority of children. However, crucially—this is a really key message that I want to land today—there must be recognition within that that fostering cannot work for all children. It works for the majority but not all. For those children who need to go into residential care, we need to do a lot more thinking about what that care looks like. These are largely children with high and complex needs who need a lot of therapeutic input. For me, that part of the system needs to be much more squarely focused on therapeutic care and outcomes.
Equally, that Families First model needs to go beyond that, so we are thinking about how children can return home. We need a lot more post-removal support for families. Where children go into care and the prospect is that they will remain there for some time, we cannot say, “Okay, job done; they’ve gone into care. We know they’re safe and we know they’re getting the support they need”. There needs to be continuity of work with the family. This would ensure that, for cases where reunification is appropriate, it becomes possible because the work has been done with the family. Eavan and I work on reunification policy a lot together and I am sure she will say more about that this morning.
As I said, we are on the right track, broadly speaking. It is just that we are at the very start of this process and we are essentially unpicking large-scale system dysfunction. The system has been designed for younger children and for harms within the home. However, I am sure the committee has heard from the DfE that we now have an ageing cohort within care. We are looking at adolescence a lot now, and in that space we are talking about extra-familial harms—harms outside the home. How do we get good outcomes for those children in a system that was not really designed for them? We need far more specialist expertise in adolescence, alongside professionals who are on the front foot of emerging teenage trends.
Another crucial thing for me—this comes back to what Nicola was saying—is that we need to look much more holistically at outcomes, particularly for children in care. We need to look not just at their experience of care, which is largely where Ofsted’s focus is, but at what their life looks like outside of that. What does it look like at school or in relationships with their existing community? We then build up a picture that allows us to look at the child’s journey over time, rather than just looking at a snapshot in time, which is what the current system and data in it largely do. We need to look at the trajectory: where have they moved on to from a starting point? We are quite good at doing this in the education space but are not there yet with children’s social care. Moving away from that snapshot in time is a key point.
An ideal system, achieving better outcomes, would be much better at capturing subjective experiences, and this is really hard to do well. I know that Ofsted and the DfE are trying, but in a lot of cases it is a bit of an add-on. It is a bit of, “Oh, let’s go and talk to some children and some parents and carers”, and then you get into a whole issue around inclusivity, representativeness, and the accessibility of those opportunities to engage with those children and families and carers, particularly where there are complex needs or there are communication needs; or you may have a child in an out-of-area placement where the local authority is being inspected and actually that child is now out of that local authority area. It needs to be a very focused effort where what we refer to in the sector as participation is recognised a specialist skill and is not just an add-on. It is not just about having a board of children and young people who meet quarterly. We need to be a bit more upfront about how tricky it can be to obtain that qualitative, child-centred data. In a system at the start of immense reform, that data can quite easily get left behind because it is very hard to do well, and in all honesty we struggle with it in the sector as well.
Eavan Mckay: I agree with everything that has been said so far. A system that works well and is delivering good outcomes for children is going to be one that is focused on prevention at every stage of the child’s journey. Jess set some of that out just now. At the moment, we are in the process of delivering wide-scale children’s social care reform, and there is a lot of hope and optimism in terms of the ideas behind that reform of building a more preventative system.
Earlier this year our charities, together with the Children’s Society and the NCB, jointly released the Children’s Services Funding Alliance report, which we have done for the past—I cannot even remember how many years now.
Jessica Ford: Yes, I think it has been five years.
Eavan Mckay: That report showcased what we have seen over previous years: currently 80% of children’s social care funding is being spent on late-stage intervention and crisis support. There has been around a 40% reduction in early support funding for those early preventative services over a 10-year period. That is really concerning.
We have these reforms that are really focused on this Families First model that is investing in preventative earlier support. However, it is going to take time for those to filter through the system for us to actually see the impact of those reforms and for that to impact the number of children who are reaching crisis point. We need to be realistic about how long that will take and talk about the level of investment required so we can really see those changes come through into the system.
I would also say that neglect is a really illustrative example of where the system does not work in a preventative way and is not targeting harm early enough. In 2024, we produced research where we spoke to local authorities about neglect and multi-agency professionals, including social workers, told us that often they feel very confident in spotting the signs of neglect but, because of the way the system is structured, often those incidents do not reach that threshold of intervention. Essentially, they are told that they need to wait for that harm to escalate before support can be put in place. That is really wrong for children and families because we are allowing them to stay in harmful situations for a protracted period of time. It is also really awful for the system, because we are allowing families to get to a crisis point that requires later-stage intervention, skewing the funding and creating awful situations for those children and families. That is a really good example of where there should be more focus: the current reform programme does not have a specific focus on particular harms, such as neglect, or how it is going to tackle that through greater investment and greater workforce upskilling.
One of the things we have talked about is looking at the definition of neglect. At the moment, the definition stipulates that neglect needs to be assessed as persistent. That is really difficult for a practitioner to observe, because it is often a cumulative harm; there is a kind of drip-drip effect in terms of the harm that is building for that child. The definition is wrong to say that support cannot be given until it reaches that point of persistence because we are losing opportunities for early support to be in place.
Jess also mentioned other areas that I would absolutely echo. The preventative model and this idea of working with families in a holistic way is really honing the belief that I think we all have that, wherever possible, children should stay with their families if the support can be in place to allow that to happen safely. Those principles really need to be applied at every single point in the system. There is a lot of focus on how we can prevent children entering care, and that is absolutely right but, as Jess mentioned, what can we do to say when a child could safely return home? How can we make sure that is possible?
At the moment, when children return home—this quite often happens in an unplanned way, or even if they are supported to return home in a planned way—local authorities are telling us that they struggle to provide and sustain long term support. We produced joint research with Action for Children in 2024 showing that local authorities want to provide more support to families before and after a child returns home, but they simply do not have the resources to do so.
This is a real problem because essentially what is happening is that children and families reach this cliff edge where they return home, the support is then cut off and of course the problems that resulted in them going into care in the first place could well resurface. That return home then breaks down and they return to care. We know that that is happening from the data we have: return-to-care rates are really high and that is worrying.
There is also a really good economic case for the Government to pay more attention to this. We commissioned Professor Lisa Holmes to do some research on this issue. We know that the Government are spending around £300 million per year—I will make sure I get the exact figure—on return homes that break down. We also know that, if they were to invest in longer-term support for reunification, that would cost about £67 million. The difference is really stark. That preventative approach needs to be looked at throughout the whole system.
Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson: Thank you so much. Those were incredibly rich answers and I know my colleagues are very keen we start digging in. We have some great material here about what good looks like, but I want to come back to you on one point, Jessica: it sounded like as we do not necessarily have a very clear idea of what good looks like for children with very complex needs. Is that fair?
Jessica Ford: Yes, that is fair. Part of the issue is that we do not always really know what we mean when we talk about complex needs. For me, there are three categories. First, complex needs that are inherent in the child are things to do with health and learning needs. Secondly, complex risks are about harms within the child’s direct environment, whether that is a harm to them or by them. Thirdly, children in complex situations is about their environment and structural issues, such as poor-quality housing, pressures that the family are facing, poverty and all those kinds of things. Those definitions need unpicking a little, but key to that, once you have understood those definitions, is to apply them to the cohort of children who we have in care.
We talk about how care entries have stabilised but, when you look below that data, we know that they have dropped significantly for under-nines and particularly under-fives, whereas the adolescent cohort has increased, particularly at 16-plus. You have to be careful with the data because there are significant kinds of influencing factors—for example, unaccompanied asylum-seeking children are included within the care cohort. However, we know that a lot of this adolescent rise is about extra-familial harms. Over time, we have become much better at identifying those harms, but the care system’s service response to them is not good enough yet.
There is a really critical point to make here about the current drive towards fostering. We wholly support it; it is absolutely the right thing to do and, as a provider of fostering places, we will be part of that attempt to grow places and diversify the foster carer market. However, we have to recognise that, for a lot of that cohort, the foster sector is probably not going to able to meet that sort of need. This is why I am keen for the committee to take away a key point around the importance of looking at children’s homes and not minimising the role that they play within that fostering debate, particularly where we are talking about complex needs.
Whether we are talking about complex needs or complex risks, where there are high needs—they are not adolescents and it is due to neurodiversity, autism, health needs, all those sorts of things that we are all very familiar with—we must recognise that the children’s home sector has a key role to play. It will always have a key role to play, but there is a lot of discussion around having a therapeutic sector. My sense is that there are a lot of providers that are not actually delivering genuinely therapeutic care and that is really critical in this complex needs space. What needs to go before that is really understanding the cohort and understanding what we are all talking about when we say complex needs.
Q28 Lord Johnson of Marylebone: I want to come back to the general description Jessica Ford made of the system, when you said “large-scale system dysfunction”. Could you help us understand whether there was there a particular policy change that contributed to this concerning state of affairs arising or whether it was just a general drift over time? Have there been any one or two specific policy changes that have inadvertently worsened the state of the system?
Jessica Ford: I have not thought about that before; that is a really interesting question. I believe that there has been drift over time. We also have to be a bit careful about what we mean by dysfunction as well. I know there is a lot of media interest and public discourse around deprivation of liberty orders, the rise in the use of unregistered homes, high costs and all of that. Sometimes that type of conversation masks the reality of what is going on in the system and particularly on this high costs point. As I was previously implying, the care requirements for a lot of the children who are in the cohort now will have high costs. That is what the requirement is and we need to make the distinction between what is a justified high cost and what is not. In order to do that, we need better data and I know that the DfE is working on that. It is wanting to develop a dashboard where you are able to do like-for-like comparisons across different placement types. The dysfunction has certainly emerged over time.
In the care system, the market has been left to do what it wants. I do not think there is enough national oversight of what the market looks like, such as the inherent risks in it. The ability to shape the market as you would want for the current cohort of children just has not existed and we are now doing that very late. The market reforms that have been proposed are very comprehensive and they will get us to a better place, but obviously that does not do anything for the children currently in the system.
Lord Johnson of Marylebone: In your remarks, your description of the dynamics within the age groups of the children in care was interesting. I have not seen that in the briefing material that we have had so far—that the younger group populations are stable or falling, and adolescent children are increasing as a proportion of the overall mix. You also said that the percentage of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children was a growing and important part of that story. Could you help us understand the dynamics of what is going on in the older population and the extent to which unaccompanied asylum-seeking children are a part of it?
Jessica Ford: Obviously you get fluctuations over time of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children entering the care cohort, and that tends largely to affect the adolescent cohort. We have perhaps in the past made some assumptions about the extent to which that is driving those increases in the older cohort and given less focus to the non-UASC cohort and the extra-familial harms that are having am impact there. Certainly when we do our Children’s Services Funding Alliance report, there will always be a line in there as a caveat that UASC are included within the data. It can tend to affect the proportion of what type of care is being used so, over time, how unaccompanied asylum-seeking children are coming into the system will then affect the split across the different care types.
Lord Johnson of Marylebone: Could you just give us a sense of the proportions? I am not sure I have a grip on that.
Nicola Smith: Some 9% of children in the care system are currently unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.
Lord Johnson of Marylebone: How has that changed over time?
Nicola Smith: In terms of the percentage, I am not completely sure. I can say that, if you look at the increase of children in care over the last 10 years, the number who are unaccompanied asylum seekers is comparatively small. There are definitely bigger issues at play. If you look only over the last one or two years, a lot of the increase in children in care came from the unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.
Jessica Ford: We can follow up with the committee on the data, if that is helpful.
The Chair: I was going to ask you to do that, please.
Q29 Baroness Redfern: I have a question on social worker instability. I see that 24% of young people experience three or more different social workers in one year. Do we have difficulties in recruitment in certain areas? It just seems quite a lot for a child to have three social workers in a year.
Eavan Mckay: There are definitely difficulties in recruitment and retention; that is absolutely agreed. I would separate it into a couple of different issues within the context of the current reform programme at the moment. For example, we are really supportive of the new family help model that is trying to address the fact that we need fewer assessments and fewer handovers of care. There needs to be less unnecessary thresholds that determine who is working with a family and what type of support they receive. We strongly support the idea of having a more streamlined system, one of the effects of which could be having fewer social workers or fewer workers who work with a family, so that they have more consistency. That is really helpful.
I will let others talk about retention issues, but one thing that we have thought about in relation to that change is that we know that we need prevention across the whole system, as I talked about at the beginning. Actually in some local areas we have spoken to there are real issues around skills and expertise. For example, previously, early targeted help and early help workers might have been delivered through non-social workers. That new model now—the Government have just consulted on this—will mean that it will all be delivered through Section 17; this should mean that there is social work oversight but essentially there could be non-social workers holding those cases.
We have heard from local authorities that that could place additional pressures on those workers due to a lack of confidence or a lack of skills and they are worried that that could potentially hamper retention as well. That definitely should not be happening; that is not the ideal system for a child or for a family. We want consistency of care. We want it to be relationship-based and trauma-informed. We know from the evidence that, actually, it is far more effective when they have consistency of workers—consistency of relationships—who can really get to know the child’s lived experience and all the pressures on a family. That new model is not what we want.
Baroness Redfern: No, because a child would feel more detached would they not? You will not be able to build relationships and build their confidence if this is what happens in certain areas.
Jessica Ford: I am not sure if the DfE mentioned to you that there is an enduring relationships strategy now, which is all premised on this idea that we need to get better at recognising the importance of continuous trusted relationships. That strategy is 0more focused on children’s relationships with friends, family and members of their existing community. The principle obviously applies across the system; however, the ability to deliver that is very difficult in the face of workforce issues not only because it is the workforce that facilitate that process of finding those relationships—maintaining them and nurturing them—but because those relationships are also directly with the workforce. The issues with social workers around recruitment and retention are replicated across the system.
In local authorities, alongside the social work teams, you also have leaving care teams. There are figures within those teams called personal advisers who work with care leavers in that transition out of care. That role is very variable across different areas, and the case load is very variable. Some of the capabilities around really understanding all the different challenges and risks around that transition to independence and leaving care are not always fully understood. I am not sure that the expertise is necessarily always there across all those life domains. That is how they are referred to. You are looking at health and well-being, relationships, social security, finances, housing and all of that. We need to have a system where those teams and personal advisers really know what those challenges are and what support is available locally, regionally and nationally for those young people to tap into. As with social work, what meaningful work can you really do when you have a high case load?
I think we are going to get on to a conversation about residential care, but I would say within this context that the residential care workforce also needs a lot of attention. The DfE has recently commissioned a residential workforce review that is looking across training, CPD, qualifications et cetera, and I am quite hopeful that is going to support this. Hopefully we can get more into that in the later questions.
Q30 Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Indeed, and that is going to be the area I am going to ask you about. Thank you very much for coming to see us this morning. Two of you have experience working for organisations that run residential care homes. Can you tell us a little your experience? How extensive is your coverage? How much more would you like to do? Why is it so much more expensive to put children into residential care than to have them in foster homes, and numbers are going in the other direction? Jessica, you said that you strongly favoured fostering but the numbers are coming down. I would like to get a sense of why you think that is.
Jessica Ford: In a market where you do not have enough foster placements, a lot of those placements ultimately end up being inappropriate to the child matched to them. You hear a lot about instability in placement, placement moves and out-of-area moves. When you see children eventually going into children’s homes, they have bounced through several foster placements. To be honest, a lot of the time, those placements were probably never likely to work because they were not adequately matched, whether that is due to the carer’s skills and ability to meet the needs, or whether actually maybe it was not the child’s preference to go into a foster placement in the first place. We hear about that. When you add that together with rising complex needs, you start to see many more children going into children’s homes.
Our view as a voluntary sector provider is that we definitely need a much more mixed market in the residential space, if we are going to adequately meet needs and if we are going to do very careful matching of the child to the home not only in what the home can offer but in matching to the children who are already in the home and making sure that all those peer groups are going to work. The voluntary sector—I am sure Nicola will tell you about this as well—is doing a lot of this specialist provision and we need to properly recognise the role that the voluntary sector is playing in that space.
All the work that the Government are doing around the market needs to really recognise that when we talk about a diversified market, a mixed market and reducing private sector dominance. We need to really think about what we need to do to unblock voluntary sector growth so that we can play a bigger role in this. I have mentioned previously that, in our view at Action for Children, we need to really understand what we mean by therapeutic care. We need to make sure that residential homes are genuinely offering that, ensuring that there is an evidence-based psychologically informed practice model understood by the workforce in practical terms. Everyone who is in the home needs to know what they are driving at.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: How many homes do you have?
Jessica Ford: We have a residential growth programme at the moment, so we are in the process of planning and registration. I think currently it is around 15, but I can confirm that. We are across the UK as well.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: It would be helpful to have a similar figure from Barnardo’s too, please.
Nicola Smith: I believe it is about 10 across the market, but I can also check that figure. There is definitely a lot that Jessica said that I would agree with. Going back to Lord Johnson’s question about how we ended up here, and this sense of market drift that has happened, it feels very much like the residential care market was ignored for a certain amount of time and that there was not a lot of focus on it.
We are seeing more and more older children entering care, more and more children with complex needs entering care, and at the same time we are seeing a reduction in foster carers. We have lost just over 7,000 foster carers from the foster care market in the last four years. This is resulting in much greater pressure on residential care homes to be able to take children often, as Jessica said, because foster placements have broken down.
We also know from research Ofsted did a couple of years ago, where it looked at children’s care plans, that only 50% of children in residential care had residential care on their care plan. One-third of them had fostering on their care plan. Clearly the residential care market is taking some children. Part of your question was why there is growth in residential care; it is because we have not had those foster carers coming through the system. We have had a reduction in foster carers and an increase in children entering care, and that has put pressure on residential care.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: What do you think the role of the regional care co-operatives is going to be?
Nicola Smith: The role of the regional care co-operatives has the potential as a system to help improve some local authority practice in commissioning services. At the moment, every local authority does it on their own. When it comes down to things that you need to do, such as sufficiency planning, working out how many foster carers you need and what types of foster carers, you are doing it on an individual basis. If you put everybody together, you are going to be able to grow those skills and understanding. You are also going to be able to commission at a much bigger level. This should hopefully mean that, if you are a local authority that needs only one or two residential placements, by placing with other local authorities you can block commission rather than spot purchasing, and spot purchasing at a relatively last minute. It has potential.
However, I have some nervousness around regional care co-operatives. One of the things that might happen is, once you start commissioning at a regional level, you are going to encourage people who can provide at a regional level and those are the bigger providers. We know that there are some very small providers out there currently that might operate in only one town or one city. They do a very good job but they are very small and they could end up pushed out in a regional commissioning market, which could result in fewer providers rather than more. We are a bit concerned about that point.
The other point I am concerned about takes very much from our experience of when they did a regionalisation programme in adoption. This is the idea that we could split the care system. I know we have talked a lot on this panel this morning about the importance of prevention and things such as reunification. However, under regional care co-operatives, those co-operatives are going to take the care bit, the fostering bit and the residential care bit, but family help, family support, advocacy and independent visitors are all going to stay with the local authority. In that situation, are we going to end up splitting the care system a little more and preventing a system that could look like a continual journey for a child who, for instance, enters care, but where reunification with some family support is on the agenda? Could we end up splitting all that because different people are doing different things in different places and they are not talking to each other?
It is possible that we could get round those issues with the regional care co-operative programme, but it will need a careful rollout. We need to be learning from the pilots and really investigating what is going on there. It cannot be seen as a panacea, and there are some concerns around it.
Eavan Mckay: I encourage the committee not to look at residential care in isolation. When we look at this, we need to appreciate that the pressures on the residential care market are influenced by these wider pressures on children’s social care in general. Yes, we need to look at market reform, and this is all really important—Nicola and Jess are speaking to that—but we need to continually assess that support up stream. We need to ask whether families are receiving that support before needs escalate, because the placement pressures are not just a market issue but a reflection of the wider pressures on the system.
Nicola’s point about them sitting in different places is important because the legal status of a child—whether they are in care, or in pre-proceedings on the edge of care—should not determine the amount of support a family receive to enable the possibility of them either staying at home or returning home. Too often, we think about children as being either in care or out of care, when the reality is that families’ needs do not disappear because of that child’s legal status. If we think about it in that way, it is really dangerous from a child protection point of view.
The recent awful case of the death of baby Victoria Marten showed that. Previous children had been taken into care; Victoria was going to be taken into care and the presumption was then that the risk was removed. However, risk is not removed because a child is taken into care. For example, that child may return home or, as in the case of Victoria, her previous siblings had been taken into care but she was an unborn child and the risk remained there. Working with families in the longer term and having a commitment and understanding that in many instances it is right to work with families in the longer term, not to close cases early and not to stop that support when a child enters the care system, is the right way to go.
Going back to reunification, I would be happy to find the case studies and submit those to the committee. We really saw through the research the NSPCC and Action for Children did together, where local authorities—Coventry was a good example—really committed to investing in this idea that they would work with a family for as long as was necessary and that they would not close cases, that that was the right thing to do, The level of support needs might drop down potentially and it might become less intrusive but, if those relationships were good, if that support was collaborative and if that family had a good relationship, it was really important to keep that support going to allow the possibility of return homes and to secure the likelihood of those return homes being stable. It is important for us to not have this clear distinction between in care and out of care because that is not the child’s experience.
Q31 Baroness Pidgeon: I just wanted to ask quickly—to really try to understand this residential market—whether you have any data on how many homes there are in the charity-run, not-for-profit, local authority and privately run sectors? We have seen a lot about the privately run sector in the news. Over 20 to 30 years the trend was for local authorities to either pass their home to others to manage or close them because they had so many children coming into foster care. The shift in the cohort you have described to us would suggest they need those homes now and of course they are not there; hence the private sector set in. Is there any data available?
Nicola Smith: I cannot give you numbers, but I can give you percentages. Some 80% of the residential care market—as you might call it—is now run by the private sector. Something that we have not included that I would like to emphasise is that many private homes are very good. They run very good provision for children and meet their needs, but the growth of the private sector has also resulted in a real geographical problem with residential care. We now have four times as many children’s homes in the north-west as in London. There are not more children in care in the north-west; it means that children end up being cared for very far from home, which is one way that we do not meet their needs.
One reason is that we have become so reliant on the private sector, which buys homes where property is cheap. That is why it has bought a lot of property in the north-west but that is not necessarily where the children need the homes. I very much agree with Jess that we need to diversify the market. We need to bring back local authority and voluntary sector provision to ensure—going back to the very first question—that we have the homes that children need where they need them, so that we do not end up with a lot of homes in the north-west and not very many in London.
Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson: Did you say that 80% of children are in private homes?
Nicola Smith: No, I said that the private sector runs 80% of the residential care market.
Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson: When you say the market, do you mean spaces for children or local authority spending decisions? They are slightly different.
Nicola Smith: I mean the actual residential care homes themselves; 80% of all our residential care homes are run by the private sector.
Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson: You may not have this but, if you have, it would be very interesting to see: is there a level of analysis under that in terms of spaces for children—not just homes but their sizes?
Jessica Ford: Ofsted does this annually.
Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson: How about spending? It would be interesting to see if there was a disproportionate number of children versus spend.
Nicola Smith: I am not sure whether spending data exists.
Jessica Ford: That may have been included in the CMA work, but it would have been a one-off.
Nicola Smith: We can pick that up.
The Chair: Can we look at that? If you have more information, please send it in.
Q32 Baroness Watkins of Tavistock: I am very interested in this housing issue. We have Section 108 on new housing developments and we usually look for a school or health provision, but I do not think we have routinely looked at whether we should ensure that Section 108 is used for a children’s home as well. As we are about to build several new towns and some big developments, would that be useful?
Nicola Smith: I am going to put my cards on the table and say that my understanding of housing legislation is not great.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock: If Barnardo’s or NSPCC, for example, wanted to deliver more care homes, and if we could take this away as a committee, would it be helpful if they were significantly cheaper for you to go into in expensive areas? I hear exactly what you have said.
Nicola Smith: We are going to come on to talk about fostering but we need a world that includes the housing element, which has often been missing from this conversation. For instance, in fostering, if all you build is a lot of one-bedroom flats, you are not going to have a lot of people with a spare room. I do not know exactly how to do that because I do not know housing, but I would like a situation where the housing and planning positions of local authorities took into account, for instance, building homes that are big enough such that people could have a spare room and that we do build residential care homes.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock: That would be really helpful because it is something we really can take away.
The Chair: Can we move on to the next section? I am not trying to shut you down, but I am sure you will get an opportunity to add to another question.
Q33 Lord Barber of Chittlehampton: I have learned a lot in the last half hour or so; this is really impressive. I want to ask about one particular bit of the market that we heard about from the DfE last week that is clearly an issue: the use of unregistered children’s homes. What extra risks does this regular, routine use of unregistered children’s homes pose to the children and society?
Jessica Ford: What the risks boil down to is the issues about the safety and suitability of the property itself, for the child. That equally applies to the staff around safety, vetting and all that sort of thing. The risk of harm and exploitation increases because these places are flying under the radar and the staff are not necessarily skilled to identify or manage that risk.
Just to reference a previous discussion, it is not just about being able to get a children’s home in a local authority where you know there are children who need children’s homes; it is about what goes around the placement and what integrated support is available across multi-agency partners. There is isolation in both a service and social sense. Crucially—I know I keep coming back to this point on residential care—there is a lack of meaningful therapeutic input.
On unregistered, the current approach is a bit carrot and stick. I am not sure if you are aware of the Ofsted proposed reforms to ILACS and SCCIF, the inspection frameworks. They are proposing what they are calling a limiting criterion, where local authorities will not be able to get above a certain judgment if they are seen to be using unregistered provision. While we support that really focused approach, there are risks around unintended consequences. You could end up in a situation where you have local authorities that are actually being very careful about their use of unregistered provision but a child may go into a registered placement that is actually far less able to meet the needs than the unregistered provision. The unregistered placement may be a well-known, trusted provider currently going through a registration process. It is a very nuanced issue and I am conscious that the media interest in it does not always fully represent that.
That limiting criterion approach needs to be very careful. You need to be looking at the quality of oversight the local authority has and the extent to which it is proactively addressing its use. It needs to be going to these unregistered providers and making sure they are getting registered or replacing that provision entirely. That oversight of the use of it is very different in different local authorities.
Lord Barber of Chittlehampton: I can imagine at least two categories of unregistered homes. One is an unregistered home getting children funded through it and the other is on track to registration fairly soon but might be a provider that is already providing registered care homes. You would probably—at least I would—have more faith in the latter than the former. My understanding from the conversation that we had with the DfE is that, technically, an unregistered home is illegal. What should we do about that?
Jessica Ford: We have come to the view in Action for Children that there needs to be a temporary registration system for situations that I am describing, where you are in the planning process and on the map with Ofsted, which understands who the provider is and the quality that we are talking about. It is just a case of opening a new setting; the type of support that is going to be provided in the setting is very similar to the existing footprint and all that sort of thing. There is such a gulf between that and a setting that has just popped up out of nowhere, with no track record. It is unhelpful to talk about unregistered provision without making those distinctions.
Lord Barber of Chittlehampton: It is very important, because obviously Barnardo’s has been providing homes for 100 years, but that is a different thing from a fly-by-night, suddenly existing children’s home taking state funding. Where the state is funding children, Ofsted should presumably be inspecting that home.
Jessica Ford: Yes, and Ofsted is doing work to get a better handle on where unregistered is springing up. There is definitely no want of ambition or enthusiasm to address that. My understanding is that it is a capacity problem.
The Chair: I was going to ask if that is essentially a capacity problem because it has been recognised for some time. You may not know but what is being done about that capacity problem to speed up the process of registration?
Jessica Ford: Do you mean specifically on unregistered or generally speaking?
The Chair: On unregistered.
Jessica Ford: There is certainly work under way to look at registration as a whole. There is a big backlog on registration, whether it is on trying to tackle unregistered settings or not. There is a prioritisation process where, if you are funded to open a setting through the capital investment programme or are opening in a geographical area of shortage, you are fast-tracked. I would argue—possibly Nicola as well—that there should also be a fast-track for voluntary sector provision where you are a trusted provider.
Nicola Smith: Yes.
Jessica Ford: There are a few other measures that could be considered on this point. We have an issue where it would help a lot if we were able to transfer registered managers between settings within our own footprint. Currently you have to go back through the whole registration process for that registered manager to move to a new setting. Things like that could be quite easily picked up. As I said, I do not think Ofsted is unaware of these issues and is not tackling them; it is a capacity issue around churning through these registration processes.
Lord Barber of Chittlehampton: I can see that that potentially is a soluble problem. We could do away with the unregistered category, because we would have that temporary registration setting. Where there was already an organisation such as yours with a track record, you could fast-track, as you could in certain other circumstances. You might think of the few that are left, "Well, do we really want those?"
Nicola Smith: It goes back to everything that we have just talked about—having enough places and residential care. We will get on to fostering. Look at the number of children who were subject to deprivation of liberty orders and the number who ended up in unregistered. The Children’s Commissioner did research on this and found young people living in caravan parks, holiday homes and things like that.
There is certainly a part of the unregistered market that is being used at present simply because there is nowhere else for that child to go, and we need to solve that problem. There is definitely an issue with unregistered provision that is on the road to registration, but there is certainly provision being used at present—small amounts, but no amount is right—where children are being placed in provision that they simply should not be in.
Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson: When we talk about the backlog and the time it takes for registration, I do not have a sense of whether we are talking about months or years here. From your experience, if you were opening a new home how long would it take you to get registration through from start to finish?
Jessica Ford: We find it is really variable across different local areas. Registration can happen within 12 weeks if everything is in place, all the paperwork is sorted, you have a registered manager, workforce and all your DBS stuff sorted and there are no planning issues to resolve. Planning issues can hold things up for any amount of time really.
Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson: When you say planning do you mean the building planning process?
Jessica Ford: Yes. It sits with the local authority. You often have to go through a process of changing the use of the property.
Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson: Then it is not an Ofsted capacity issue; it is a planning department capacity issue, so it is the two together.
Jessica Ford: Yes. Ofsted would tell you that there are frequently planning issues that are holding up registration processes.
Q34 Baroness Watkins of Tavistock: Could I ask what your assessment of the DfE’s plans for foster care is? On the face of it they are very exciting. In particular I am interested in kinship foster care, which our previous evidence has suggested is not funded properly if you really want that stability.
Nicola Smith: I would be incredibly positive. I have worked at Barnardo’s for a very long time and for pretty much all that time I have been calling for a national foster care campaign. Last week the Government actually launched a national foster care campaign. There is a lot in this strategy to be very positive about.
As I mentioned at the start, Barnardo’s is a foster care agency that recruits foster carers. We know that within society there remain a lot of myths about who can be a foster carer; for example, that you have to be married and own your own home. As one voluntary agency trying to dispel these myths we do the best we can. Is it not nice to get the whole engine of government behind a national conversation about what foster care is? Foster care changes; it is not the same. You do not have to be a foster carer full time; you can do short break care.
At Barnardo’s we offer really quite unusual foster care placements. We do remand foster care for young people who would otherwise enter the criminal justice system, for example. We do not think a national conversation has happened in this way before so it is very positive.
I am very pleased with other ways that the Minister has really started to listen to some things foster carers have been telling us for years, particularly around what it is like to be a foster carer in the system. He is looking at things such as the concept of delegated authority—a posh term for being able to sign the form so that your child can go on a school trip—to make that the default and make it a lot easier to create a family environment. We are saying to foster carers, "You’re really key; you’re part of the team around the child and deserve to be in the room”. Too often they have been excluded in the past. This is all really good stuff.
Where could it perhaps go a little better? This comes back to the previous question around housing. Housing and foster care is definitely an issue that we know happens. When it comes down to why we—as Barnardo’s—struggle to get foster carers, frequently it is because adult children are staying at home longer; the Covid pandemic and people working from home mean spare rooms are often used as offices nowadays and people generally are struggling with the housing market.
I know the Education Committee did its inquiries and talked about whether we could join up housing so that we do not just build one-bedroom flats, because that is not going to give us a spare room. It feels like housing is a bit missing from the foster care strategy; there is not a lot on it.
The other element that we would really like to look at is that it is great to get 10,000 foster carers in but we have to keep them there and make sure that retention is as important as recruitment. There are some things that we could do on the central government level just to really say as a country how important we think foster carers are. For example, we could give foster carers a national exemption to council tax to show that we think foster carers are really important.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock: That is a great example. I have spoken to foster carers who say, “Nobody understands what it is like for our finances when a child we have worked with really well is either going back home or leaving us because they are perhaps going to higher education and then we have no income for three months”. You cannot guarantee the right child next week; I fully understand that but is there something about continuity of income for a period? I am not talking about for ever.
Nicola Smith: There is certainly something about allowances generally and looking at the whole system of allowances. There is significant local authority variation in the whole system of allowances, which makes it very difficult to be able to say what the system is. Certainly as a voluntary sector organisation that provides foster carers on behalf of local authorities there is significant variation in the whole allowance system that could be given a little more attention in terms of that.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock: I am aware of time. Does anybody else want to say anything and pick up the kinship?
Eavan Mckay: Can I add something? I will pass to Jess as well. I will not be long because I know there will probably be more to say on the recruitment and retention. I would just really urge the committee and Government to look at the fact that we also really welcome this recognition of the vital role of kinship carers and the investment and focus on getting more foster carers. We would really want them to apply the same principles to ensuring there is adequate support for children returning home to their families as well.
We are looking at kinship care because we are recognising that outcomes can be improved and that it might be right for a child to stay within that wider family network if possible. We have not had that same level of focus when it comes to actually supporting the family to see if that return home could be possible. I would really echo that point.
Our research showed us that over half of local authorities do not have a policy or strategy for reunification and how they can prioritise that. There is no national strategy or guidance on reunification so we do not know how local authorities are going to be incentivised to pick that up as an area that they can focus on, in terms of practice improvement without that national direction.
We have seen some good examples of good practice but on a national level it is not looking good, because we know that one in five children who return home then actually return back into care within a year. Something is going quite badly wrong there. We really welcome this focus on kinship care and getting more foster carers. With kinship in particular we would say there is lots of learning and we want those principles to be applied to reunification as well.
The only other thing I would add for fostering—I will let Jess come in on the retention and recruitment point—is that there is some really interesting learning around and we need to focus on what we want the role of foster carers to be. Of course bringing them in and recruiting and retaining them is the first part of that. There is some really interesting evidence internationally. Again it links to the points that I am making on reunification about how foster carers can actually work more collaboratively with birth parents, play that supportive role of modelling parenting, help build that relationship, and how that can really support those return homes when they are possible and safe to do so—that mentoring role. That is something I would encourage the committee to look at. I am happy to submit some international evidence that I referenced.
Jessica Ford: I will do quickfire. For the 10,000 places ambition it is really vital that it is a diverse pool of carers. Recruiting lots of the same people is not going to help to the extent that the Government need it to. As Nicola said retention is really key. We have good retention as an independent fostering agency almost solely because we offer wraparound support for foster carers. We are talking about short break, respite care at weekends, therapeutic input, all that sort of thing.
To Nicola’s point on financial support, we have a commitment around inflation-linked national minimum allowances, which is great. The consensus in the sector is that it still does not cover the cost of caring. We also have the fees, which are skills-based and are the opposite of the allowances. We do not have any standardisation of that across the country so that varies hugely. I am not sure if DfE spoke to you about the Staying Put scheme, which is the stay-on scheme for foster children beyond 18. There is no baseline for allowances in staying put at all so that needs looking at.
The organisation Kinship is the key player in this space. It has done a lot of work on the prevalence of poverty among kinship families, which I implied in an earlier comment. From its research it learned that it is financial issues that can often deter kinship arrangements. What the Government want to do is get as many kinship arrangements as possible to sit outside the formal care system, ie not within the fostering space. There is a new piloting programme—Kinship Zones—where financial support among other things is being piloted for kinship arrangements outside foster care. That is brilliant and is showing us a lot about what financial support can do to support the stability of kinship arrangements.
The consequence of it—this is obviously inherent in piloting things—is that we now have a huge discrepancy between kinship carers within the pilot who are having non-means-tested allowances at the same level as foster carers, versus the rest of the country who are on means-tested allowances. The pilot is due to run for three years. With the Government being so committed to kinship it feels like a bit of a gap and that we could be doing something in the meantime.
My final point is that paid employment leave for kinship carers is something that Kinship is also really pushing. That would be on the same level as adoption leave. It is about that moment when the child arrives, settling them, routines, bonding, working through trauma and all that sort of thing. There is nothing in the system for that at the moment. It is being looked at; there is a parental leave review ongoing and we are hoping to see that as an outcome.
The Chair: On staying put, did you say there is a scheme?
Jessica Ford: Yes.
The Chair: Is that a government-backed scheme?
Jessica Ford: Yes. It is what it sounds like: you can stay put until 21. There is some discussion around the age—as to whether it goes up to 25 or not. As you would expect it is very popular. In some local authorities you can be paid quite adequately through the allowance for it, but in others you are not.
The Chair: Is it not standard across the counties?
Jessica Ford: No.
The Chair: That is very helpful. I had not heard of that.
Q35 Lord Mohammed of Tinsley: I am just going to comment on what you said, Nicola: in Sheffield in the past we have tried to have a rebate scheme for foster carers getting council tax back on certain bands. It has been signed off by the finance officers but never got through the budget so it will be interesting if we can get it as a national scheme.
My question is on a separate note. You have all raised it today and the previous panel that gave evidence last week talked about the growing complex needs of our young people. The obvious question that flows from that is: is our training and development of staff adequate?
Eavan Mckay: I am thinking about two different things in relation to that question. There are the expertise, training and skills as you say, but then there is also the system, the resource and what is in place to allow them to harness that expertise and skills and put them in place to support children and families. We have this system or landscape now where practitioners are increasingly working families with multiple interacting challenges and harms and they interact with other challenges, whether it be poverty, domestic abuse or mental health issues. We have to think about how well-skilled professionals are to work with that picture.
From an NSPCC perspective we would think about, “Okay, well, looking at the whole picture, how well is the workforce equipped at the moment to respond to specific groups of children and specific types of harm?” There are a couple of things that I would bring out on that point. I have talked about neglect and I will have to talk about it again, I am afraid, because it is really important in that we know the system at the moment is not responding to neglect in the way that it needs to. In the research that we did, we spoke to multi-agency professionals who told us that they are essentially often being told by their superiors above that they have to wait for it to escalate to a later point before they can have that intervention in place. That is not right for children or the system.
I talked about changing the definition so that it considers removing the persistence point to make it easier for professionals to access support earlier. There is also something there about recognising the contextual stresses on families. Scotland—in its definition of neglect—recognises poverty as a contextual system stress that can overload parents and be a contributory risk factor. It does not mean that there is a direct correlation between poverty and neglect; they are completely different things and neglect can happen in any home but it means that poverty can work to overload parents to make parenting more challenging. Most importantly, poverty can influence the likelihood of other risk factors such as poor parental mental health or stressors, and we know from evidence that those things can increase the likelihood of neglect. That is the first thing that I would raise in terms of a harm that we do not think is being tackled well in the system and that there needs to be more skills, upskilling and training around. That could be done through a national neglect strategy in the first instance and by looking at that definition.
The other area and group of children that I would point out is babies and infants. NSPCC feels really strongly that the system needs to do far more to ensure there is specialist understanding of child development, attachment and infant mental health to assess the lived experience of babies and infants. Babies and infants represent 34% of serious case reviews—when a child is seriously harmed or killed as a result of abuse and neglect—which is really stark. It is persistent over time; it has not reduced.
We are seeing over the long term that the system is not responding to better protect babies and infants in the way that it needs to. We know that babies and the youngest children cannot verbally disclose harm in the way that older children can. Practitioners really need that confidence to identify risk through professional judgment, observation and understanding of babies’ lived experience and expertise.
We can see that through serious case reviews; we know what is going wrong. In the murder of Star Hobson, for example, it was identified that practitioners over-relied on what the adults were telling them about Star’s experience; they were not doing a good job of assessing risk and actually bringing to life the lived experience of Star, which had horrific consequences. That feels like a really crucial area that we want more to be done on.
I would highlight the children’s social care response to child sexual abuse. There were a number of reviews, including the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse and the Casey review, which have consistently found that practitioners are often—again in a similar way to babies and infants but in a different context—overly reliant on children verbally disclosing abuse.
In intrafamilial child sexual abuse, there is a lot of shame and a challenge for that verbal disclosure to come through the system, and professionals need to not be reliant on that. They need to really have that professional curiosity and those skills in observation and analysis of patterns, and to understand those behavioural indicators. All the evidence shows us that there are real, persistent challenges around the skills and expertise to be able to do that within the system. I would point to those two areas in the first instance.
I have also mentioned—but will say it again in this context—that there are definitely some questions around the workforce’s capability in the context of the roll-out of the family help reforms. As I said, we are very supportive of the principle of the reforms. From speaking to local authorities about that implementation, there are two things I would mention now. First, the scale and timescale of reforms are placing a lot of pressure on local authorities. There is a lot of concern about when the money is going to run out and whether they are going to be able to implement in the time that has been given to actually allow the impact of the preventative measures to come through.
Secondly—this is very important when we look at prevention across the whole system—with this new family help model, it is very welcome that more children will be getting the level of Section 17 support that was in place before for a child who reached Section 17. That support should now be in place for those children who were previously identified as early help and it should be more streamlined, comprehensive and robust. That is really welcome.
What we have concerns about from speaking to local authorities is actually that in lots of areas what they are doing to deliver family help is just combining the early help and Section 17 support. What that means—if the new introduction that the Government just consulted on goes ahead in terms of all that support being then delivered under Section 17—is it could actually risk that threshold going up and that old-school early help support not being in place because it has been removed. For this to work and be preventative across the whole system, not just shifting thresholds, we also need that investment in the true early help support services as well as the family help ones that are being rolled out at the moment.
Q36 Lord Barber of Chittlehampton: Building on the question that my colleague asked, I understand all that you have said about identifying child abuse and all that, but I do not want to focus on that. One of you talked earlier about Ofsted needing to inspect the whole life of the child, not just the home, and I agree with that; it is important. There is a real challenge for all the professionals involved to do two things that are in tension. One is to have the highest possible expectations of this young person and the other is to deal with the complex and very challenging needs.
I wonder if there is a skill set, training programme or set of developments that can help people maintain those two things, which are often almost daily in tension for many of these people. If you lower the expectations you never get the outcomes in the long run. If you do not acknowledge the needs you cannot get the improvement going. Do any of you have schemes for doing that?
Eavan Mckay: I cannot speak to schemes and I will let others come in, but local authorities need the space and commitment of long-term funding and investment in children’s social care that is not just tied to programmes of reforms to really be able to invest in workforce development and skill sets.
Lord Barber of Chittlehampton: I agree with that but do you know of schemes or people who have developed the ability to do what I just described?
Nicola Smith: I certainly cannot think of a specific scheme. When we look at Ofsted this is definitely something where it very much can come down to individual inspectors and approaches. The new framework for inspection that Ofsted recently consulted on aims to do this. We are very much keen to look at the starting point of the child and be able to get an understanding of some early groundwork that we have put in to help progress.
To give you an actual real-life example, we had a child in one home who had very severe autism and many behavioural issues and difficulties interacting with services. When we took them in, the home managed to work with the child, who had never used a knife and fork or sat at a table before and get them to sit down and have a meal. That is not attending school or the higher outcomes and things we absolutely want, but it is very important that the inspection regime recognises that progress and is able to acknowledge the very good work the providers have done, because it is the foundation for the next stage on.
At the moment as Barnardo’s we find it very dependent upon the inspector and how the inspection ends up going. The current framework very much starts talking and looks far more to embed the experiences of children and young people within the inspection framework. It should maybe help but it is very much going to be about individual inspectors. To answer your question, I do not know of a scheme that has been able to achieve that.
Q37 The Chair: We have talked a little about Ofsted in different ways with unregistered homes in the workforce and the new inspection framework. What other priorities should Ofsted bring to the table in its inspection regulation work?
Jessica Ford: I am happy to lead on this. We feel really positive about the new inspection regime, particularly in respect of the proposed evaluation areas and the new approach to grading and reporting. It could bring a much more consistent, thorough and nuanced approach to how quality is assessed, reported and communicated.
Obviously the proof is in the pudding. There are issues around having meaningful buy-in from local authorities and providers. We see this in the education space, where the effect of not securing the buy-in of the target of the inspection is quite serious. We are at a really critical point with Ofsted now in how it is inspecting where we can start doing some stuff much better.
To secure buy-in from those being inspected—local authorities and providers—they need to be seen to be really accurately and sensitively reflecting the quality of care and representing context in a sufficiently nuanced way. Context is all about the factors that are influencing how those services and that care are being delivered: things that are both within the local authority or provider’s control and those that are not. We need to be serious about what those things are that are not within their control.
To Nicola’s earlier point we need to see much more consistency of inspections across both place and time so that people feel confident that they are getting fair treatment in a sense. They need to know that they will have the same level of assessment and there will be the same expectations when they are next inspected.
Related to that point about needing buy-in, we need to get to a place where Ofsted has a relationship of both oversight and support so providers and local authorities are supported to go on this process of continuous learning and improvement. Some of this is about the accessibility of the inspectors. In an ideal world you would have the same inspector showing up over a period of time. They would be available between inspections to have meaningful discussions about quite basic things such as what the distinctions are between the different grades, what they mean in practical terms, what they can do better next time to get to that grade and remove some of that slightly opaque process.
Equally there need to be feedback mechanisms. When I speak to the operational directors who oversee all our provision at Action for Children they tell me that the feedback mechanism must sit outside the formal complaints process. There is no confidence that using the formal complaints process is not going to affect you in your relationship with the inspector and potentially the outcomes there.
I have talked about this point around assessing outcomes relative to starting points, looking at the journey and trajectory and looking holistically at the child’s life beyond the setting and specific care that they are receiving in the local authority. Within that there is something about not making comparisons between what are essentially non-equivalent cohorts by Ofsted.
Another key point that we raised in our response to the Ofsted consultation is around the voice of children, parents and carers. I mentioned this earlier in the session. There needs to be a lot of proactivity on Ofsted’s part about how this is done, offering different modes of engagement at different points inside and outside the inspection processes. Ofsted needs to think about all those different groups it needs to reach and not just go for those that are most available for the discussions.
My final point is quite specific. There is a new evaluation area on enduring relationships. This goes back to what I was saying earlier around DfE really wanting the whole sector to focus on building and maintaining continuous trusted relationships for children. That is really welcome; the new evaluation area is really overdue. At the moment I would say it is framed quite squarely on what the local authority or provider is doing to support the child to build and maintain relationships with family, friends and their community.
What we as a provider find—particularly in the children’s home space—is that there is a lack of clarity around how those relationships can continue with the workforce within the placement. When a child leaves a placement—whether that is due to breakdown or because they move out of the system—what does good look like in that situation? How can we navigate all the issues around consent and risk for some relationships to continue with the workforce?
There is something that you hear quite commonly in the sector around children who have left a children’s home being invited back for Sunday lunch every week. In practical terms that is quite hard to do in some settings, particularly where the relationship sits with a particular member of the workforce in the home. Some of the solution is about seeing it as an organisational responsibility. There is a gap where there is guidance needed to support that process so that settings feel really confident to do it, obviously where the child has the preference to continue those relationships. That new enduring relationships evaluation area is really positive but that is a really crucial missing part of it.
Nicola Smith: Can I just come in with a couple of extra points? I agree with most of that and this time I will not repeat what has been said. One thing that we have found in the past is that Ofsted kept a little aside from the general direction of children’s social care reform. We introduced a new framework for children’s social care in England but we did not update the Ofsted inspection regime to go with it. That has changed because we have just had a consultation, which we are very pleased about as you will gather.
Going forward, as we have a government reform programme we have to make sure that as we learn from things such as the families first for children pathfinder from regional care co-operatives we are continually having conversations with Ofsted and enabling it to update its inspection regime, which cannot sit entirely independently. For a long while there was a certain sense of, “The Government are telling us to do that but Ofsted’s telling us to do something different”, and that has an impact.
The other element that I want to bring in—just to add a little to what Jess said about the involvement of children and young people—is thinking about the involvement of children and young people in the actual inspections themselves. We ourselves run what we call the Young Inspectors Programme, where we get some children and young people from our own services to go to inspect our services for us and talk to the children and staff. We find that incredibly rich in terms of what they are able to tell us. Our young inspectors do about 10 inspections a year and are able to give us a really different perspective than what we might get from an Ofsted inspector. I wonder if Ofsted could do something similar.
Eavan Mckay: I will be very quick because I am aware of the time. We responded to the consultation that has been mentioned and really felt it was a very welcome focus on children’s experiences and the stable relationship element that Jess pointed out. There are just three areas—I will be very quick—that we pointed to that could be further strengthened.
There was much greater emphasis on assessing how well the system was bringing in and listening to children’s voices, which we were very pleased to see. I want to go back to the point that I raised earlier about the unique vulnerability of babies and infants. When we cannot bring in the voice of babies and infants in the same way as we can for older children, what that inspection framework needs to include is a really clear assessment of how skilled professionals are at bringing in the voices of those who are less visible through the observation and supervision mechanisms that can do that. That is the first point I would raise.
The second point is around how the system is working to prevent harm from escalating and whether we are responding early enough. There were some elements that we included in our consultation response about strengthening that area of the framework.
Thirdly, this links to what Nicola said about how we need real join-up between these different changes, the Ofsted inspection framework and the wider expectations in family help. We were really pleased that in the family help guidance there is—not enough, because I would call for national guidance or a strategy—reference to how family help teams should be supporting and working around supporting reunification. We need to look at how the Ofsted inspection framework can examine the quality of reunification planning and pre- and post-support and how well that support is working with the family help teams to deliver it at different points in the system.
Lord Barber of Chittlehampton: This is a small point that builds on what Nicola said, which I thought was very important. I have seen this in the school inspection work since Ofsted was invented in 1992. When you change the way the system works and what it is expecting, you need to change the Ofsted inspection framework but also invest in the inspector’s skills; otherwise they are looking for the wrong thing.
Nicola Smith: We are a little worried. The Ofsted inspection regime includes a lot more things such as the enduring relationships and talking to children and young people. It is all really positive but it also still includes a data scorecard that is basically how many placement moves you have had and so on. Could we get some inspectors who go, “Oh, I recognise that; that’s what I am going to focus on”?
Lord Barber of Chittlehampton: What if the Ofsted inspectors do not know what good or bad look like in the new system or cannot find them?
The Chair: Can I thank you immensely for the time and the amount of information you have given us this morning? I was going to ask you a question about priorities, but you have laid out very clearly where you think the priorities should be. If there are any other matters that you do not feel we have covered, please write in to us. A huge thank you for your time this morning. All the committee would agree it was a very helpful session and we will certainly keep in touch going forward. I will close the session.
