The Children’s Commissioner for England – Written Submission (PSC0043)

The role of the Children’s Commissioner was initially established under the Children Act 2004 which gave the Commissioner responsibility for promoting awareness of the views and interests of children. The Commissioner’s statutory remit includes understanding the experiences of children and encouraging decision makers to take children’s interests into account. Her unique powers to gather data and enter premises to talk to children live away from home enable her to gain insights into the lives of vulnerable children and gather evidence on their needs. The Children and Families Act 2014 further strengthened the remit, powers and independence of the Commissioner, and gave her special responsibility for the rights of children who are in or leaving care, living away from home or receiving social care services.

The current commissioner is Dame Rachel de Souza whose term commenced on the 1st March 2021.

About this submission

This submission was drafted by Martin Lennon, Head of Public Affairs (and policy lead for vulnerable children) and Tom Clarke, Head of Data Science.

A large proportion of the work of the Children’s Commissioner is dedicated to understanding the needs of vulnerable children and the provision that is available for them. In this submission we have sought to avoid reproducing research published elsewhere. Instead, we have attempt to provide a brief summation of some of the key issues that our research has uncovered. We are very happy to provide additional evidence on any of the points.

This submission is in two parts.

Part 1 looks at recent evidence on vulnerable children in England:

1)    There are more vulnerable children than Government and society have traditionally been aware of

2)    One set of vulnerable children are at risk of multiple different poor outcomes

3)    The number of children “at risk” is large relative to the population who experience serious harm.

Part 3 looks at the implication of this evidence for Government’s response to vulnerable children. In particular, we argue that the combination of (1), (2) and (3) have four implications for Government response:

4)    The response to vulnerable children needs to be system-wide

5)    Interventions may have a broad range of benefits, across multiple systems and conversely, one outcome may involve multiple agencies

6)    The economic rationale for investing in vulnerable children is a broad one

7)    Partnership working requires better understanding of relative responsibilities, a shared outcomes framework and improved data-sharing.

We conclude by posing some of the questions we hope the Committee will be able to investigate.

All data cited is drawn from CHLDRN: Childhood Data on Local Risks and Needs. For a full explanation of CHLDRN and our vulnerability framework from which this is drawn, see Annex 1.

Part 1: What recent evidence tells us about vulnerable children in England

There are more vulnerable children than we think

The traditional perception of children’s social care is of a service that supports a small group of children. The population of children in care or on statutory child protection plans is about 128,000 – less than 1% of all children. Similarly, the Troubled Families programme was originally designed to help only 120,000 families over three years[1], on the basis that it was these families that had multiple and complex needs which were costing the state a disproportionate amount of funds.

But a succession of reports in the past three years have indicated that the population of children whom we would deem vulnerable is actually much greater. 

In 2019 the Children’s Commissioner’s Office produced research estimating that there were 2.3m children in England who were vulnerable due to family circumstance in which they were living.[2] These children have one or more of the following characteristics present within the home:

• Domestic abuse
• Parental drug or alcohol abuse
• Significant mental health issues being experienced by both parents (or one parent in a single-parent family)
• A parent or sibling has a health condition for which the child has caring responsibilities
• Severe poverty and material deprivation
• A parent in prison
• The child being in care

Of the 2.3m children we identified as vulnerable, roughly a third are receiving known support, mainly via Child in Need plans or through the Troubled Families programme. In addition, about a third are known to services but it is unclear what, if any services they receive, and about a third are ‘invisible’ to services, not receiving any support from the state. The second, known to services, category consists of:

• children whose families are on the Troubled Families dataset (and so qualify for the programme), but which local authorities are not funded to work with;
• children who had a ‘Child in Need’ referral during the year but were not being receiving formal support from children’s social care.

The breakdown between different levels of support for this group of 2.3 million children is shown on the figure below.

Figure 1: Vulnerable Children in England

When it was first published, the CCO’s work was an outlier amongst comparable estimates of the size of the vulnerable cohort. However, two subsequent studies have also identified large cohorts of vulnerable children.

In 2019, the Department for Education’s Review of Children in Need review[3] found that there had been 1.6m children who had been open to statutory social service interventions in the past six years. This was 1 in 10 children in state schools. In 2020 this was followed up by a long-running longitudinal study conducted at Bristol and Oxford University that found that 1 in 8 children needed a social worker at some point before the age of 16. While these two studies show a broader vulnerable population over time both studies show a long-term legacy of vulnerability.

Similarly, the Troubled Families programme is now working with about 400,000 families[4] and those known to the programme (so qualifying but not currently receiving a service funded by the Troubled Families programme) extends to another 761,000 children (shown in light blue in the figure above).

In Figure 3 above, families who are receiving support from the Troubled Families programme and statutory children’s services are counted only in the children’s services figure to avoid duplication. The 271,000 figure is for children only receiving support from Troubled Families and is therefore smaller than the total number of children being supported by the programme.

The same vulnerable children are at risk from low-level and high-level harms

Abuse, Neglect and Serious Harm

The Children’s Commissioner estimate of 2.3m vulnerable children is based on the presence of one or more of seven significant risk factors within the home. The first three of these – domestic abuse, parental mental health issues and parental drug and alcohol abuse – were chosen because these are the factors most commonly identified in social worker assessments[5] and serious case reviews into children killed or seriously harmed in the family context[6]. This continues to be the case. Other issues such as severe poverty or being a young carer were included on the basis that they were factors which placed significant strain on children likely to impact on their outcomes.

Contextual Safeguarding Issues

It is not just serious harm or neglect in the family environment that these children are at risk of. Protecting children from external risks such as sexual or criminal exploitation outside the family home is known as ‘contextual safeguarding’, and these wider risks are just as serious for young people as the risks of abuse within families. Children growing up in the vulnerable circumstances outlined above are more likely than other children to experience these ‘contextual safeguarding’ risks as well as to experience risks inside the home.

In 2019 the Children’s Commissioner’s Office examined the profile of nearly 8,000 children known to children’s services or youth offending teams as involved with gangs[7]. This research found that substance abuse, alcohol abuse, domestic violence, violence towards the child, neglect and offending in the family were all key risk factors. The central finding was that:

“58% of gang associated young offenders have any of the above family factors recorded at their latest assessment. After differences in age, gender and ethnicity are accounted for, this is 42% more likely than other young offenders.”

Children in contact with children’s services for gang related reasons were as likely to have the above family-level risk factors as those in contact for other reasons (neglect, abuse etc). The same or similar risk factors were identified by the Local Government Association[8], the Early Intervention Foundation[9] and the National Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s investigation into safeguarding children at risk of criminal exploitation[10].

Poor Educational Outcomes

The vulnerable children identified above are also more likely to experience poor educational outcomes. The 2019, the DfE’s ‘Child in Need’ review[11], found that just 17% of children who had been open to social services in the past six years went on to pass English and Maths GCSE. The research from Bristol and Oxford Universities[12] put the Attainment 8 attainment gap for children who had ever had a social worker at 34ppt. This is to say these children score, on average, 34ppt lower on the Attainment 8 score at GCSE than the nonvulnerable cohort. To point out the significance of this, this attainment gap is larger than the FSM or SEND attainment gaps.

In 2021, the Children’s Commissioner published further research examining the inter-linked nature of childhood vulnerability and how it impacts on educational attainment. The research made two conclusions:

Firstly, that being in touch with social services, in and of itself, correlated with weaker, but still reasonable, educational attainment. However when children have multiple vulnerabilities (such as SEND, FSM and contact with social services) then this tends to lead to very poor educational attainment. This is shown in Figure 2 below.

The second finding was that nearly all children who have or have had a social worker also have additional vulnerabilities.: 80% of these children had also had a history of SEND or FSM. Similarly, more than half of children with a history of FSM also have a history of SEND or involvement with children’s social care.

In conclusion then, we can say the same risk factors make children vulnerable within the home, outside the home and prone to very poor educational outcomes. This point is vital for considering the economic case for investing in vulnerable children, which we go into below. 

The number of children “at risk” is large relative to the population who experience serious harm.

As outlined above, we can identify a population of about 2.3m children who are at significantly heightened risk of a range of harms. But the number of children who go on to experience the most serious harm is still, relatively low. Last year there were 449 “serious safeguarding incidents” reported to Ofsted, where a child was killed or seriously harmed, and abuse or neglect were indicated.[13] This is, in part, testament to the success of our safeguarding system which does very well on international comparisons at preventing the most serious harm and death[14]. 

Even when we look at the number of children requiring the most serious – and expensive – interventions, the numbers are low relative to the numbers at risk. There are about 80,000 children in care and about 715 in custody[15]. In total there are about 1,400 children in some form of secure care. While the costs of this care is considerable – we estimate about £300m is spent on this cohort[16] – the total number of children is low relative to the at risk population.

Moreover, there is a growing body of research to suggest that accurately identifying children likely to need services from children’s social care is challenging. Our recent research suggested that (based on data available centrally) we could successfully predict only 1 in 5 children who come into care for the first time aged 13-15 by looking at prior characteristics[17]. This was partly because only 1 in 5 of these children were open to services two years prior to entering care.

However, this analysis also demonstrated the range of vulnerabilities experienced by these children, with notably higher rates of exclusions, absence, school instability, low level SEN and free school meals eligibility than other children in the cohort. This means we can confidently identify broad cohorts of children who are vulnerable and need additional help. But what we could not do is predict, within these cohorts, which individual children will enter care (and therefore need the most expensive support) relative to other forms of social care involvement. This has significant implications for considering the financial basis for investing in preventative services (see economic rationale below).

Part 2: The implications of this research for Government’s response to vulnerable children

The response to vulnerable children needs to be system-wide

The number of children with significant risk factors/vulnerabilities demonstrates the need for a broad response to childhood vulnerability. This level of need cannot be addressed by children’s services alone. Instead, we need to see the safeguarding[18] of these children as a joint endeavour between local authorities, schools, the NHS and the police, with the support of communities and the voluntary sector. The 2017 Children and Social Work Act made significant progress is establishing this as a principle. It changed safeguarding from a sole local authority responsibility, to a joint local authority, police and NHS responsibility (specifically Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG)). While the change was largely theoretical, it did force local areas to replace Local Safeguarding Children boards (convened by local authorities and largely responsible for reviewing practice) with local safeguarding partnerships convened jointly between the local authority, police and CCG who are meant to plan local services. The Children’s Commissioner believes more is needed to embed this legal change into a change in practice and we welcome the Department for Education’s decision to commission Sir Alan Wood to conduct a review into better utilising the new structures. 

Beyond this we would stress two particular elements of the need for a broad response:

1)    Schools will be supporting a large number of vulnerable children, often before, after and alongside other agencies.  This has significant implications for how we consider the funding allocated to schools, the expectations we set for them in terms of safeguarding and well-being, but also how we share data between them and local partners, and how we involve them in the support for families as well as children.

2)    The major drivers of childhood vulnerability are family stressors including poverty, insecure housing, domestic violence, alcohol and substance abuse, and poor parental mental health; alongside risks outside the home such as gangs and exploitation. Alleviating these issues cannot solely be the responsibility of children’s services or the Department for Education. While children’s services should protect children from these risks, ideally we would be looking to remove the risks entirely.

We would urge the Committee to look at where responsibility sits within Government for these elements of the prevention agenda, and the role social exclusion plays within this. In particular, we would question whether Central Government has the requisite mechanisms and structures to consider the implications of services for adults on their children.

Interventions may have a broad range of benefits, across multiple systems; conversely, one outcome may involve multiple agencies

There are many positive interventions across Government which aim to address different aspects of childhood vulnerability, but there is no overall coordinating strategy to address childhood vulnerability as a whole. It is the case that one intervention may have multiple benefits, realised in different ways, and that multiple interventions may be needed for one clear benefit. This is best shown by two examples.

Extended Schools (after-school and holiday opening)

Extended schools provide a method of increasing the educational attainment of disadvantaged children. They provide cheap childcare for working parents, they help alleviate poverty by providing both food and activities, they can help reduce youth crime by providing key diversionary activities and can help reduce obesity by keeping children active. One extended school programme can do all of this. But we do not have one programme:

• The Department for Culture, Media and Sport is funding a range of extended/out-of-school initiatives through £500m for the Youth Investment Fund and £7m for the Youth Accelerator Fund[19].

• The Home Office is providing a similar range of interventions through £200m for the Youth Endowment Fund[20].
• The Department for Education has a long-running summer schools programme that has been boosted in response to Covid. This is now receiving £700m in funding[21].
• This is separate funding to the £220m allocated to the school holiday and food programme, which was designed specifically to use holiday provision as a way of alleviating holiday hunger[22]. Though DFE administered, this programme followed the work of DEFRA’s food taskforce.

Therefore, we have four separate programmes, each with a separate stated aim, each being evaluated against different criteria. Each programme will be assessed for value against the specific stated aim. But in reality these programmes will be broadly similar in form and beneficial outcome. Government does not appear to have the structures in place to capture the multiple beneficial outcomes across multiple departments. 

School readiness

Conversely, we also have a situation where one outcome can be the responsibility of multiple parties. This is perhaps best illustrated by looking at school readiness. Each year about 14% of children fail half or more of their 17 development indicators in Reception. This means they have profound development difficulties across multiple domains. They are starting school from such a low point that they are unlikely ever to catch-up[23]. The opportunities to help these children are multiple:

• NHS England is responsible for maternity and neonatal services. It has a wide-ranging programme of reform, but the reform programme only extends to six-months.
• Health visitors are overseen by Public Health England nationally, and local authorities locally. Though they are generally delivered by hospital trusts or private companies. Crucially, they administer the 2 1/2yr development check ‘ages and stages’.
• Throughout childhood, the family of any child “not likely to reach a normal standard of health or development” is entitled to statutory support from the local authority under Sect.17 of the Children Act.
• At the same time, both local authorities and the NHS should be working together to identify and support special educational needs, through shared responsibilities such as speech and language therapy.

Thus, one outcome can be simultaneously the responsibility of multiple parties and none. 

Where does responsibility sit for co-ordinating these multiple strands of work impacting on vulnerable children? In particular:

• What is the role of the Senior Responsible Officer for Vulnerable Children across Government (currently the Deputy Permanent Secretary at the Department for Education) and does this role have the requisite powers and resources to co-ordinate cross-Government work?
• What role is the Cabinet Office playing in orchestrating a combined response across Government?
• Do the Departments with responsibility for one area (such as school readiness) have the ability to orchestrate cross-Government change? If not, has the Cabinet Office given enough focus to vulnerable children, and the early years in particular, in their structures?

We think Government needs more than boards, or committees, but genuine integrated working across Departments which includes dedicated staff, a shared outcomes framework, shared data and shared funding allocations.

The economic rationale for investing in vulnerable children is a broad one

As we argue above, a large group of children are at risk of multiple poor outcomes. The number of children at risk is very large relative to the number who receive very expensive interventions, and an intervention in one service is likely to see benefits elsewhere. The most obvious examples of this are family support services and early years services. The benefits of these interventions should be seen in educational outcomes and increased economic activity across a lifetime[24].

But Government must be able to evaluate these wider economic benefits. Ahead of the 2021 Spending Review we think there are three fundamental challenges the Treasury must address:

1)    Does it have the structures in place to evaluate wider economic and social benefits where one programme is funded within one service area but delivers benefits across a range of other services owned by other departments? This applies to many forms of early help and preventative services.

2)    Is the Treasury considering the implications on children of reductions in adult services? For example, we know that at-home alcohol consumption has increased considerably during lockdown. The resourcing of public health teams now will have significant consequences on the demand for children’s services in the coming years. How is this being considered?

3)    Is the Treasury mapping out how multiple spending decisions can impact on one group of families? For example, one group of families may lose out simultaneously to cuts in welfare, children’s centres and health visitors. Conversely, another family may benefit from increased spending in multiple ways (as illustrated above with extended schools). How is this analysed through the spending review process?

Partnership working requires better understanding of relative responsibilities, a shared outcomes framework and improved data-sharing.

As well as the structural issues within central Government, there are a series of practical impediments to more integrated working. We are aware that the Committee has already examined these issues in its previous report, so we have not emphasised them in this submission. However, it is worth stating that these issues remain.

In particular we would stress the importance of a common outcomes framework around vulnerable children. As this submission has argued, there are a number of different parts of the state working with the same vulnerable families, often to the same end. A common outcomes framework would emphasise these synergies and focus attention on common goals. It wouldsimplify both the integration of services in practice, and  the evaluation of services at a strategic level. In doing so it would help to alleviate some of the structural issues we have covered in this submission.

Annex 1: The Children’s Commissioner’s Office’s vulnerability framework and the CHLDRN app

The Children’s Commissioner’s first Vulnerability Report, launched in 2017, compiles the evidence and data on the numbers, experiences and outcomes of vulnerable children in England. It provides a comprehensive way of defining and classifying what it means to be vulnerable child, along with what is currently known about how many children have a particular vulnerability.

As part of this work we have developed a framework of 70 groups was set out in our 2018 and 2019 reports across the following themes:

• Children receiving statutory care or support
• Children known to have experienced specific personal harm
• Children with a disability, ill-health or developmental difficulties
• Children in households or families with characteristics that indicate higher potential likelihood of current and future harm
• Children who are vulnerable by virtue of their identity or nationality
• Children at risk in relation to activity or institutions outside the home
• Children caring for others

In the last 12 months we have made available all key indicators used in this framework that are available at both a national and local level through our own web app called CHLDRN (Childhood Data on Risks and Needs).

This interactive online tool provides the most complete picture of the numbers of children at risk in England, at both a national and local level. It makes available over 100 indicators across different age ranges and types of risk, and allows users to explore how these vary across local authorities and parliamentary constituencies in England. Our aim is to make this data accessible so it can be used and visualised by national and local policy makers, researchers, journalists and analysts.