Written evidence submitted by the Child Welfare Inequalities Project [ACS 006]

Evidence submitted by Professor Paul Bywaters, Huddersfield University, principal investigator for the Child Welfare Inequalities Project, Professor Brid Featherstone, Huddersfield University, and Professor Kate Morris, Sheffield University.

Key points:

1.              Expenditure cuts since 2010 have had a much greater impact on high deprivation local authorities than low deprivation local authorities.

2.              Local authorities have responded by cutting family support and prevention while spending more on looked after children. This has produced a hidden policy change in the balance of children’s social care provision.

3.              Cuts in spending on support and prevention have been much greater in more deprived local authorities as the deprivation premium has become too small.

4.              This level and pattern of spending is creating a vicious circle, pushing up demand for high cost, late intervention services.

5.               Rebalancing services towards family support is key to ensuring sustainability.

6.              There needs to be major debate about the appropriate level of children in care and the quality and nature of family support services.

Background

The Child Welfare Inequalities Project (2015 – 2019) (and a previous pilot study in 2013-14) is funded by the Nuffield Foundation. It aims to quantify and understand the reasons for inequalities in the proportion of children who are on child protection plans (or registers) or who are looked after children between the four UK countries, local authorities, neighbourhoods within local authorities and ethnic groups.

We have analysed data on over 6,000 children on child protection plans (CPP) and over 8,000 looked after children (LAC) on 31st March 2015, from a representative sample of 18 local authorities (LAs) in England and undertaken case studies of local decision making, policy and practice in England, Northern Ireland and Scotland. We also conducted a literature review of the relationship between poverty, child abuse and neglect for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Nuffield Foundation. We have examined changing patterns of local authority spending on children’s services and the relationship of spending to the quality of services. For references to published papers, see below.

The Lack of Data on Parents. The complete absence of systematic national data about the socio-economic and demographic circumstances of the parents of children in contact with children’s services is a key problem in analysing the factors that influence service demand. Collecting such data should be an urgent priority to underpin policy, service management and practice. While several initiatives are attempting to grapple with this issue, it requires central government direction and resources to produce effective, consistent, comparable results. In the absence of such a commitment, recording and reporting data on children’s home location in the form of the Lower Super Output Area would enable data about children to be linked to data on deprivation through the Index of Multiple Deprivation scores and ranks. This addition to Department for Education CIN and CLA data collections would radically enhance the potential for informative data analysis.

Problems with Section 251 returns. Local authority spending on children’s services is publicly reported in annual S.251 returns. There is widespread agreement that S.251 data is problematic for two main reasons. There is a lack of consistency in how Local Authorities categorise spending, making comparisons between LAs problematic. There is also a lack of alignment between S.251 categories and service activity, making the costs of particular services impossible to accurately identify.

1.      Is the funding for local authorities’ children’s services sufficient to enable local authorities to fulfil their statutory duties?

Headline Finding: Overall cuts in spending per child and rising demand have affected local authorities unequally. More deprived local authorities with higher levels of demand had larger cuts in expenditure per child.

1.1 Overall Reduction in Children’s Services Spending Since 2010.

While many local authorities have done their best to protect children’s services funding, from our analysis, overall expenditure per child on children’s services fell from £902 in 2010-11 to £768 in 2016-17 (adjusted for inflation @2016 prices), a reduction of 15% (Table 1). A similar conclusion was reached by the Institute for Fiscal Studies in its 2018 report for the Children’s Commissioner’s Office https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/publication/public-spending-on-children/ . This evidence is at odds with the findings on funding for Children In Need by the National Audit Office (2016), reflected in the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee report (2016), because these reports were based on a limited part of overall children’s social care expenditure.

The cut in overall expenditure per child has taken place against a background of rising demand. Numbers of children in care at 31st March have risen by 11% over this period, with larger increases in the numbers of children being investigated for child protection concerns during the year (up 66%) or starting a child protection plan (up 35%).

Sources: ONS Population Estimates; Section 251 Outturn England Summary, excluding City of London and Isles of Scilly, adjusted for inflation (IFS).

1.2 Demand Pressures

Demand pressures have meant that expenditure often exceeds budgets. As our work and other research has shown, there are three key drivers of children’s services demand: family socio-economic circumstances, the ethnic mix of the child population and the size of the child population (Bywaters et al., 2018a, 2018b, 2018c).

Family socioeconomic circumstances. Children in the most deprived 10% of neighbourhoods in England are around 10 times more likely than children in the least deprived 10% to be looked after, in care, or to be on a child protection plan. Deprivation is very unevenly spread between local authorities so this has a major impact on local demand. Austerity policies coupled with welfare reform have resulted in a well evidenced, wide ranging increase of socio-economic pressures on families. Downward pressure on low incomes (in or out of work), has been coupled with a deliberately harsh approach to benefits claimants designed to enhance the incentives to work, or to work more hours. Accompanying pressures on housing and a range of allied services (health, education, domestic violence, police, drugs, youth services, Sure Start) have exacerbated the problems families’ face. Recent evidence from the What Work’s Centre has shown a clear relationship between changes in income and demand for children’s services (What Works Centre 2018).

Ethnicity. The proportion of children from minority ethnic groups varies between local authorities from almost zero to around 80%. Our research found that ‘White British’ children were 10 times more likely to be in care than ‘Asian Indian’ children but ‘Black Caribbean’ children were twice as likely to be in care as ‘White British’ children. The proportion of children from different groups in any local authority has a substantial effect on demand.

Population. The total child population aged 0-17 rose by 587,000 (5.2%) between 2010 and 2017 according to ONS estimates.

1.3 Inequality, Cuts and Demand Pressures

Many reports have evidenced the overall cuts to children’s services funding. The key point in our evidence is that neither demand nor changes in spending have affected local authorities equally or randomly (Webb and Bywaters, 2018). More deprived LAs have faced larger population increases (Table 2) and larger spending cuts (Table 3).

Source: ONS population data and IMD 2015.

Source: S251 data, IFS and IMD 2015.

2.      What are the financial challenges for local authorities’ in providing non-statutory services?

Headline: Early years and early intervention services have borne the largest cuts in expenditure but cuts have not been distributed equally with the largest cuts in these services occurring in the most deprived local authorities.

2.1 A hidden policy change: family support decimated

Children’s services expenditure can be analysed in terms of three broad categories: spending on children looked after (including care leavers, adoption and special guardianship); safeguarding expenditure (largely made up of spending on social work staff); and family support and prevention services. The latter include early years (Sure Start Children’s Centres) and other family support services many of which aim to help families so that problems do not escalate.

The Department for Education (2016, para. 20) stated that ‘The main strategy that we identified was placing an emphasis on early help and integrating services’. However, its own funding data in that report showed quite the reverse, whatever local authorities’ (LAs’) intentions. This pattern has continued subsequently so that the proportion of total spend attributable to services other than safeguarding and children looked after has fallen from around 46% in 2010/11 to 31% in 2016/17 (Table 4). This shift from early prevention to high cost, late intervention amounts to a hidden policy change.

Again, similar conclusions were reached by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS, 2018) about overall funding in all LAs, using a similar but different breakdown of expenditure categories. They reported a 61% fall in funding for Young People’s services and a 60% fall in Sure Start/early years funding. By contrast, funding on Looked After Children’s services increased by 22%, while Safeguarding and Family Support combined remained roughly constant. Given that our data showed a rise in the Safeguarding spend, these IFS data also imply a fall in Family Support.

Source: S251 data.

This policy change is not surprising. LAs are bound to prioritise children for whom they are in loco parentis and who are identified as at risk of abuse or neglect. The paradox is that cutting early years and support services creates a vicious circle increasing demand for more expensive late intervention. 

2.2 Inequity

Again this policy shift away from prevention and family support has not occurred equally across local authorities. As would be expected from the earlier evidence, high deprivation, high demand LAs, have had to cut family support prevention services more (52%) than low deprivation, low demand LAs (34%).

Source: S251 data, IFS, IMD 2015.

3.      How can funding for children’s services be made more sustainable in the short and long term? How can innovative approaches to the design and delivery of children’s services support financial sustainability?

Headline: Two key factors would support longer term sustainability. One is to re-balance the pattern of expenditure and service provision towards prevention and family support and away from late, high cost intervention. The other is to re-balance the distribution of spending between local authorities, by giving a larger share to more deprived local authorities.

3.1 Sustainability: breaking the vicious circle

The current pattern of an increasing proportion of spending on late intervention and reducing proportion on prevention creates a vicious circle which further drives up the rates of children in care, a highly expensive form of provision. Despite important and valuable efforts to improve the lives and futures of children in care, overall the outcomes are not good. The main route to sustainability must lie in shifting the balance from a narrowly targeted focus on identifying children for high cost late intervention towards services and policies which help families to stay together and thrive. If high cost services are (almost) all that is left, children who could be supported to stay at home will enter care because there is no viable alternative. This is shortsighted as both the Chief Social Worker (Trowler et al., 2018) and the President of the Family Division (McFarlane, 2018) have both recently argued from very different evidential bases.

This raises the question of what kinds of family support services are required. There is increasing evidence that specific models of practice which appear to have a robust evidence base (such as Systemic, or Restorative Practice, Motivational Interviewing or Signs of Safety) may have a more limited impact when applied in new contexts and at a different time, although some general lessons may be drawn (Department for Education and Spring Consortium, undated). Models which focus on parenting skills but which do not take account of the material and social circumstances in which parents are applying their skills (including the contradictory effects of housing, welfare and employment related policies) may set parents up to fail. This damages trust between parents and services providers and can, in turn, lead to parents being blamed for a ‘failure to engage’. 

But evidence is beginning to grow about more effective approaches to supporting families (Featherstone et al., 2018). Accounts from families on the receiving end highlight how services that operate in siloes, that come and go and are subject to changing thresholds and criteria destroy trust. Children with multiple diagnoses are particularly vulnerable. Families can be prevented from seeking help with problems for fear of being accused of putting their children at risk. Families have a lot of knowledge that could be used to design services that work for them rather than services that are a poor fit (Morris et al., 2017). Quickly accessible non-stigmatising sources of practical and emotional help are vital. Many of these have been lost with the hollowing out of Sure Start Children's Centres, but in some areas schools are responding to community need, taking over the Children's Centres and developing services in them. They have joined up with other schools and formed community hubs, believing that if they can offer advice on finances and direct parents to someone to talk to, they can act as important sources of prevention.

Community based approaches to prevent maltreatment that target neighbourhood processes are promising though underdeveloped. These involve ways to strengthen neighbourhood ties and increase social capital, the lack of which are risk factors for maltreatment. Such programmes include Strong Communities for Children which mobilises not only service providers but also community members to understand how their efforts can directly affect the prevention of child maltreatment in the neighbourhood (see Melton G. 2014; Reimer et al., 2018).

3.2 The Inverse Intervention Law

A key question is whether current levels of looked after children are necessary or ‘right’. Often workers say they had no choice but to remove children, given the family circumstances at home and the lack of support services. However, our research and other evidence raises questions about the current level of intervention. If England had equivalent rates of children in foster and residential care as Northern Ireland, there would be 40% fewer looked after children.

Again, structural factors are affecting children’s chances inequitably. Our research has found that the most deprived Local Authorities (by IMD ranking) ration their services more tightly than less deprived Local Authorities primarily because – relative to the demand they face – their expenditure is further below what is required. This has also been confirmed and developed by Hood et al. (2016).

When children facing equal levels of socio-economic disadvantage (or advantage) in low deprivation and high deprivation LAs are compared, children in the low deprivation LAs are much more likely to be in care than children in high deprivation LAs. We have called this the ‘inverse intervention law’ (Bywaters et al., 2015).

Table 6 shows how children are distributed across high and low deprivation LAs and neighbourhoods. In the least deprived 20% of local authorities (Q1), 39% of children live in the least disadvantaged 20% of neighbourhoods in England. Only one child in six lives in a deprived or very deprived neighbourhood.

But in the most deprived 30 Local Authorities (Q5), over half (58%) live in the most deprived 20% neighbourhoods. The circumstances of children in different local authorities are profoundly different with major implications for demand and expenditure.

This radically affects demand. There are local variations in LAs children’s services activity but the main drivers are not a post code lottery but systematically related to the socio-economic circumstances of families in their area and the economic status of the local authority itself.

Figure 1: Children Looked After rates per 10,000 in high (top third) and low (bottom third) deprivation local authorities by deprivation quintile (2015).

Source: Child Welfare Inequalities Project and ONS Population data.

As can be seen from Figure 1, overall (right hand column) low deprivation local authorities have a smaller proportion of children in care (40 per 10,000) than high deprivation LAs (73 per 10,000). However, if you compare equally disadvantaged neighbourhoods, at every level (1 to 5), low deprivation LAs had significantly higher rates.

This underlines the argument that although high deprivation LAs spend more money per child than low deprivation LAs, they do not spend ‘enough more’.  There is an insufficient premium for deprivation in the distribution of children’s services spending. The funding formula is currently under review.

Conclusions

1. Expenditure cuts since 2010 have had a much greater impact on high deprivation local authorities than low deprivation local authorities.
2. Local authorities have responded by cutting family support and prevention while spending more on looked after children. This has produced a hidden policy change in children’s social care provision.
3. Cuts in spending on support and prevention have been much greater in more deprived local authorities as the deprivation premium has become too small.
4. This level and pattern of spending is creating a vicious circle, pushing up demand for high cost, late intervention services.
5. Rebalancing services towards family support is key to ensuring sustainability.
6. There needs to be major debate about the appropriate level of children in care and the quality and nature of family support services.

December 2018

References.

Bywaters, P., Brady, G., Sparks, T., Bos, E., Bunting, L., Daniel, B., Featherstone, B., Morris, K. & Scourfield, J. (2015) Exploring inequities in child welfare and child protection services: explaining the ‘inverse intervention law’, Children and Youth Services Review (2015), v. 57, October, pp. 98-105 doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2015.07.017   

Bywaters, P., Brady, G., Bunting, L., Daniel, B., Featherstone, B., Jones, C., Morris, K, Scourfield, J., Sparks, T., Webb, C.  (2018a) Inequalities in English child protection practice under austerity: a universal challenge? Child and Family Social Work 23, 53–61 https://doi.org/10.1111/cfs.12383  

Bywaters, P., Scourfield, J., Jones, C., Sparks, T., Elliott, M., Hooper, J., McCartan, C., Shapira, M., Bunting, L., Daniel, B. (2018b). Child welfare inequalities in the four nations of the UK. Journal of Social Work. https://doi.org/10.1177/

Bywaters, P., Scourfield, J., Webb, C., Morris, K., Featherstone, B., Brady, G. Jones, C. and Sparks, T. (2018c) Paradoxical evidence on ethnic inequities in child welfare: towards a research agenda. Child and Youth Services Review. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2018.11.042

Department for Education (2016) Children’s services: spending and delivery, (July). https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/535043/Childrens_services_spending_delivery_report_Aldaba_EIF_July_2016.pdf

Department for Education and Spring Consortium (undated) Implementing Systemic Models of Social Work. https://innovationcsc.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/2.26_Social-Work.pdf

Featherstone, B., Gupta, A., Morris, K. and White, S. (2018) Protecting Children. Bristol: Policy Press.

Hood, R., Goldacre, A., Grant, R., & Jones, R. (2016). Exploring Demand and Provision in English Child Protection Services. British Journal of Social Work, (April), bcw044. http://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcw044

Institute for Fiscal Studies (Kelly, A. E., Lee, T., Sibieta, L., & Waters, T.) (2018). Public Spending on Children in England: 2000 to 2020, (June). https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Public-Spending-on-Children-in-England-CCO-JUNE-2018.pdf

McFarlane, Rt. Hon. Sir Andrew (2018) Key Note Address: “Crisis; What Crisis?” Association of Lawyers for Children Conference, (November), 1–14.

Melton G. (2014) 'Strong Communities for Children' in Korbin, J. E and Krugman, R. D (ends) Handbook of Child Maltreatment Vol 2, Springer.

Morris, K., Featherstone, B., Hill, K. and Ward, D. (2017) Stepping Up, Stepping Down. How families make sense of working with welfare services. Family Rights Group. http://www.frg.org.uk/images/YFYV/Stepping-Up-Stepping-Down-Report.pdf

National Audit Office (2016). Children in need of help or protection, (October). https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Children-in-need-of-help-protection.pdf

Newton and LGA (2018). Making sense. Understanding the drivers of variation in spend on children’s services. https://www.newtoneurope.com/content/spend_on_services.pdf

House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts (2016) Child protection. Thirty-first Report of Session 2016–17 https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmpubacc/713/713.pdf

Reimer, E., Stewart, C. and Bec, A. (2018) It takes a town: igniting a culture of generosity to build a thriving environment for all children in 2484. New Community 16, 1: 40-47.

Trowler, I., White, S., Webb, C., Leigh, J. (2018) Care proceedings in England: the case for clear blue water. https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/polopoly_fs/1.808960!/file/Clear_Blue_Water_Policy_Briefing.pdf

Webb, C. and Bywaters, P. (2018) Austerity, rationing and inequity: trends in children’s & young peoples’ services expenditure in England between 2010 and 2015. Local Government Studies DOI: 10.1080/03003930.2018.1430028

What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care (2018) Exploratory Analyses of the rates of children looked after in English local authorities (2010-2017). https://assets.ctfassets.net/7swdj0fkojyi/2usYNQZ8ig4aGq0gIum4qA/85b9cabbabdb1c9adb6345c438631949/Reducing_Care_Exploratory_data_analyses.pdf