Written evidence from Surrey County Council (CFA0111)

 

HOUSE OF LORDS CHILDREN AND FAMILIES ACT 2014 SELECT COMMITTEE INQURY

 

 

  1.              This response is submitted on behalf of Surrey County Council. We are a large two-tier county authority, with over 1.2m people and over 250,000 children and young people aged 0-18 years old. At any one time we support around 1000 looked after children, 3,500 children in need (including c.850 children on a child protection plan) and 11,000 children with an Education Health and Care Plan (EHCP).

 

  1.              The County Council holds statutory responsibility for safeguarding children and young people, and for special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). We aim to ensure children, young people and families receive the right support, at the right time from the right service. This helps families to develop resilience and face future life challenges without the need for extra help. Our endeavours in Surrey are driven by our purpose of ensuring every child is seen and heard, feels safe and can grow.

 

  1.              As direct implementers of the current legislation, we welcome the opportunity to respond to the House of Lords Select Committee, to share our experience of the positive change resulting from the Children and Families Act 2014, alongside some of the challenges we have experienced.

 

 

Questions for responses:

Question 1: To what extent has the Act improved the situation for the most vulnerable children, young people and families in England? To the extent that it has not, is this because of the Act itself, its implementation, or challenges which subsequently emerged, whether lasting or temporary?

 

  1.              We believe the principles of the Act are well meaning and support an ethical stance to meeting the needs of vulnerable children and young people. However, a limitation of the Children and Families Act 2014 is that it must be read in conjunction with the Children Act 1989 the SEND Regulations 2014 and the Care Act 2014. Therefore, the legislation as pertaining to vulnerable children and those with special educational needs, in particular, is enshrined in at least four different key areas of law. This is challenging as it has led to areas of disconnect- with the Children and Families Act focussed on processes while the Children Act reinforces the duty to protect and reduce harm.

 

  1.             SEND

The implementation of the changes to the SEND system within the Children and Families Act 2014 came at a time of financial challenges for many education establishments. This has resulted in the utilisation of EHCPs by many of these establishments as a method to gain additional funding. Additionally, many parents and carers view EHCPs as the primary way in which they could hope to secure provision for their children. The significant increase in demand for EHCPs since 2014, nationally and here in Surrey, has resulted in increasing amounts of time taken up writing and maintaining the plans. This has reduced the available time for the SEND workforce to directly engage with families, providers and children through the assessment and annual review processes and build meaningful relationships.

 

  1.              We identify and recognise the positive purpose of reducing the timescales to undertake decisions around EHC needs assessments, to best support parents and carers to have a timelier response to how their child’s needs will be met. In reality, this change did not take into account the workforce availability of key education support professionals. Data from the Dept. of Work and Pensions, the Dept. for Education and NHS Digital all support the fact that the outcomes for children and young people with EHCPs into adulthood have not significantly improved since 2014. The extension of a statutory plan until the age of 25 should, in theory, have supported young people with SEND to transition into independence in adulthood at a time that met their needs. The reality has been that many have remained accessing low level qualifications and not gaining employment or engaging in meaningful activity, suggesting a disconnect between the principles and functionality of EHCPs.

 

 

  1.             Social Care

We believe there is a need to review court-ordered parenting assessments (residential) for parent and babies. Often these are arranged to be between 12-16 weeks however the courts are often reluctant to move the baby away from these placements despite poor engagement from parents and or an assessment and analysis outlying why a parent cannot care for a child. Therefore, courts often order that the parent and child should remain in the placement until the final hearing. Instead of having a reliance upon a residential assessment setting there is a need for greater statutory support for community assessments to intervene and support parents in the community which is a realistic setting for future care of any child.

 

Question Two: If there were to be a Children and Families Act 2022, what should it include and what might be the barriers to implementation?

 

  1.              We believe that if there was to be a Children and Families Act 2022 it should amalgamate the Children Act 1989 and the Children and Families Act 2014 as a starting point. However, there are specific areas that we feel would be beneficial for the new Act to focus on as discrete elements to enhance the current statutory provisions. For instance, emphasis on working with children and young people within early years and early help settings, and manging transition to adulthood.

 

  1.              We would encourage a new Act to be built on foundational principles and concepts of contextual safeguarding and family resilience to ensure they become systemwide approaches. Additionally, we support further commitment to the use of Family Group Conferences to ensure we work with and enhance the strengths and resilience within families.

 

  1.         The provision of a new Act would present opportunities to provide clarity on exactly what the purpose of a Child Protection Plan is, and to improve capacity around such plans. Additionally, child protection processes should be examined as we believe there is a need for more flexibility around these processes to support issues of exploitation and harm outside the family.

 

  1.         We also envision the new Act providing more opportunities to deliver joined-up care across the system, with clear directives of how partnerships should and must work together to meet all of a child’s or young person’s needs. This approach could be underpinned by statutory responsibilities for safeguarding boards/partnerships to ensure a commitment to partnership working across all services, and for them to acknowledge and address gaps in resources. For instance, we identify the benefits of health commissioners working collaboratively with Local Authorities and the benefits of pooled budgeting.

 

  1.         Regarding barriers to implementation, we urge caution that any changes to the Children and Families Act does not directly or indirectly result in a reduction of services to our most vulnerable children. Therefore, we seek clarity as to what support and/or services should be ordinarily available to children and young people from all educational settings regardless of designation or geographical area, in a newly designed Act.

 

  1.         We also acknowledge the current national, and local, challenges regarding recruitment and retention of social workers. Therefore, we encourage the committee to consider the prospect of aspects of statutory functions being delivered by alternatively qualified professionals working within Children’s Services statutory teams, in a way that safeguards all parties.

 

  1.         A new Act should also address the needs of families who have children with SEND.

 

Question Four: Have the reforms to the family justice system succeeded in making the system faster, simpler and less adversarial? How has the Act interacted with other reforms to the family justice system, for example the changes to legal aid?

 

  1.         We agree that in some areas reforms to the family justice system have succeeded in making the system faster, simpler and less adversarial. However, there is a disconnect between the desire for local authorities to work in partnership with families, building upon resilience, and what the courts expect to see when the local authority makes a care order application. Often the partnership approach with families becomes lost once the court process begins and the interventions undertaken with families can become overly criticised and devalued within the court process.  

 

 

  1.         We suggest that 26 weeks of care and placement proceedings on top of 12-16 weeks of the public law outline (PLO) can for some children feel like and be too long a process for permanency decision making. Despite practice guidance saying otherwise, there is a sense that work completed outside of the statutory care and placement proceedings remains largely unconsidered, even when it is directly supporting care and placement for the child. Upon application many families have received high levels of support from Early Help through to statutory services and at times a greater emphasis and recognition of this would enable more timely decision making with the court process.

 

  1.         Fact finding hearings on non-accidental injuries continue to be lengthy and time-consuming with ambiguity often remaining at the end of the hearing in terms of who has harmed a child, and this can make care planning more challenging if rehabilitation and / or reunification is being considered. Therefore, we suggest that any future legislation considers how the system can support a timely approach that works with families to keep children safe in parents’ care, where appropriate to do so.

 

 

  1.         We have identified that despite our use of the Family Safeguarding approach which enables social worker evidence to be multi-professional and have the input of specialist adult workers, courts continue to approve additional ‘expert’ witnesses. However, we envision a system where social workers are considered as ‘experts’ for the child and viewed as the professional who would have the greatest understanding of the child’s needs within the system.

 

 

  1.         We hope that this underpinning value improves the life and outcomes for children, as connections and involvement from both parents is paramount. Therefore, even If a child does not ‘live’ with one parent hopefully by fully involving and considering both parents this provides the opportunity for children to maintain a sense of belonging, keeps and strengthens family relationships and can create resilience for children and young people into their adolescent and adult lives.

 

Question 5: Has the Act achieved its goal of improving provision for children and young people with SEND, in all settings including mainstream schools, special schools and further education colleges? If changes are needed, could they be achieved under the framework of the Children and Families Act 2014 or is new legislation required?

 

  1.        SEND

We believe that the Children and Families Act 2014 has not significantly improved the outcomes for children and young people with SEND. We have also experienced an unintended consequence of the implementation of EHCPs in the creation of adversarial and challenging relationships between providers, families and the local authority. Unfortunately, there is also limited evidence that innovative and new approaches to delivering provision for SEND has been possible due to demand pressures.

 

  1.         We also note that the existing SEND parts of the Children and Families Act legislation has been consistently challenged in the High Court and loopholes in its interpretation and implementation exploited. Whether new legislation is needed is unclear as the principles of the Children and Families Act are reasonable, but barriers clearly exist to its implementation (as the challenges through the High Court indicate).

 

May 2022