Care Review – 2022 Independent Report

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• Author:FosterWiki
• Published:24 May 2022
• Country:

2022 Independent Children’s Social Care Review Report

Executive Summary of the Care Review

“This moment is a once in a generation opportunity to reset children’s social care.

What we need is a system that provides intensive help to families in crisis, acts decisively in response to abuse, unlocks the potential of wider family networks to raise children, puts lifelong loving relationships at the heart of the care system and lays the foundations for a good life for those who have been in care.

What we have currently is a system increasingly skewed to crisis intervention, with outcomes for children that continue to be unacceptably poor and costs that continue to rise. For these reasons, a radical reset is now unavoidable.

Achieving this reset starts with recognising that it is loving relationships that hold the solutions for children and families overcoming adversity.

While relationships are rich and organic, children’s social care can be rigid and linear. Rather than drawing on and supporting family and community, the system too often tries to replace organic bonds and relationships with professionals and services.

Without a dramatic whole system reset, outcomes for children and families will remain stubbornly poor and by this time next decade there will be approaching 100,000 children in care (up from 80,000 today) and a flawed system will cost over £15 billion per year (up from £10 billion now). Together, the changes we recommend will shift these trends and would mean 30,000 more children living safely and thriving with their families by 2032 compared to the current trajectory.

A revolution in Family Help

For families who need help, there must be a fundamental shift in the children’s social care response, so that they receive more responsive, respectful, and effective support.

To reduce the number of handovers between services, we recommend introducing one category of “Family Help” to replace “targeted early help” and “child in need” work, providing families with much higher levels of meaningful support.

This new service would be delivered by multidisciplinary teams made up of professionals such as family support workers, domestic abuse workers and mental health practitioners – who, alongside social workers, would provide support and cut down on referring families onto other services.

These Family Help Teams would be based in community settings, like schools and family hubs, that children and families know and trust and the service they offer will be tailored to meet neighbourhood needs based on a robust needs assessment and feedback from the families To achieve this vision, a temporary injection of roughly £2 billion is needed over the next five years, targeting about half a million children who require extra support.

By 2030, this will have achieved a complete rebalancing of spending within the system so that over £1 billion more every year is spent on Family Help.4 After the five-year reform programme, there should be a dedicated ring-fenced grant to ensure this extra spending continues to be prioritised in the long term.

To increase the quality and consistency of help, funding should be accompanied by a clear national definition of eligibility for support and the outcomes Family Help should achieve, alongside a focus on the use of the best-evidenced interventions to realise these outcomes.”
The full report can be found here

Useful Care Review Links

• Final Report
• Executive Summary
• Reset children’s social care
• A revolution in Family Help
• A just and decisive child protection system
• Unlocking the potential of family networks
• Transforming care
• The care experience
• Realising the potential of the workforce
• A system that is relentlessly focused on children and families
• Implementation

Useful Links

• So You Want to be a Foster Carer
• FosterWiki Top 10 Tips – For New Foster Carers
• General Introduction to the National Minimum Standards (NMS)
• Independent Report on Foster Care in England

FosterWiki Response to the Care Review

Currently, Fosterwiki is studying the full impact of the 2022 care review report and a link to the report page will be available here as soon as it has been published.