Central government needs to intervene in the market supplying residential and fostering homes for children to ensure both sufficiency and stability of provision. For residential care, this should focus on addressing the risk of disorderly exit where providers are carrying too much debt. For fostering, a national programme should be launched, delivering the enablers needed to attract and retain sufficient foster carers to meet demand. 

Local government has a role in both managing demand for homes through: effective decision-making; targeted interventions to reduce levels of need; and maximising local market leverage through strong strategic and operational commissioning. These commissioning efforts would be significantly enhanced by a commitment from the Department for Education to fund sector-led collaborations between those authorities who at present lack the required economies of scale to manage the market effectively.

Evidence from this project shows an opportunity for frontline social workers to spend 150,000 hours more per week working directly with children and families (equivalent to more than an hour per week for every child in care and on a child protection plan in England) through fundamental changes to ways of working and factors that influence them. This requires local investment and changes to working cultures including: digital systems that support efficient case recording; challenging the number of internal meetings attended; and building on the use of remote meetings with other professionals developed through the pandemic. At a national level, the extent to which practitioner behaviour is influenced by the regime of inspections, and focus on casework recording, needs to be recognised and addressed. Furthermore, disparities between what children and young people tell us is important to them and what is statutorily recorded should change, allowing for a more meaningful, child-focussed approach to measuring the impact of interventions.

In inspections this requires equal weighting to be placed on children being supported to leave care, where appropriate and safe, as is placed on children entering the care system. It also requires a new approach to risk when making inspection judgements; one that balances both the short-term risks a child or young person faces with the long-term consequences of being separated from their family and community. There is also a requirement for regulatory and inspection changes to support more flexible, innovative responses in two key areas:

• An age-appropriate offer for adolescents and teenagers, reflecting the different nature of strengths and risks they typically face when compared to younger children.
• The provision of a sufficient quality and quantity of homes for children in local authority care.

A crucial enabler of local, systemic change is a commitment from Government to a fair and long-term funding settlement for local authority children’s services and relevant partner services. Many authorities involved in this project cited the beneficial impact that having a longer-term funding plan to work to would provide; enabling them to invest with greater confidence in initiatives with longer payback periods. The model outlined here requires both investment in the significant transformation work needed to deliver the approach, as well as initial investment to support families at both ‘edges of care’. Some authorities may be able to fund these themselves; others may not be. The scope of this work has not included a detailed analysis of local authority finances and reserves and therefore any funding settlement would need to factor this in. However, it is clear that the investment would not only achieve better outcomes for thousands of children across the country, but also mitigate £1.4bn to £2.0bn of the forecast £2.1bn growth in spend on children in care expected by 2025.