Page 1 of 17

Chair: Baroness Howarth of Breckland, Tim Loughton MP

Vice-Chairmen: Baroness Walmsley, Sarah Champion MP,

Secretary: Baroness Massey of Darwen Treasurer: Earl of Listowel

Clerk: Zoe Renton

There was a meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Children

On Monday 12 September 2016 5.00-6.30pm, Committee Room 3A, House of Lords

APPG for Children inquiry on children’s social care:

Early help for vulnerable children and early intervention services

Speakers:

- Ms Donna Molloy, Director of Dissemination, Early Intervention Foundation - Ms Isabelle Trowler, Chief Social Worker - Young Advisers Bromley accompanied by Mr Joseph Fitton and Ms Liz Lake,

Advocacy for All - Dr Michael Little, Creative Director, Dartington Social Research Unit - Mr Gerald Meehan, Chief Executive at Cheshire West and Chester Council

Attendees: Tim Loughton MP (Chair) , Baroness Howarth of Breckland, Earl of Listowel,

Sarah Champion MP, Baroness Massey of Darwen, Baroness Howe of Idlicote, Lord

McNally, Baroness Pinnock, Christian Matheson MP

Apologies: Baroness Walmsley

Also in attendance: Enver Solomon (NCB), Zoe Renton (NCB), Dustin Hutchinson (NCB), Keith Clements (NCB), Karolina Kozcowicz (UNICEF), Madleine Jennings (BASW), Mary O'shaughnessy (Associate SCYJ), John Metcalf (BASW), Chris Kane Mullen (NDCS), Jonathan Stanley (ICHA), Lucy Milich (SCIE), Deborah Cowley (Family Links), Christine Puckering (Mellow Parenting), Alan Cooklin (Royal College of Psychiatrists), Gabrielle Lorenz (Association of Child Psychotherapists), Andrew Wilson (Ofsted), Mathew Hussey (The Children’s Society), Kadra Abdinasir (The Children’s Society), Lisa Payne (MiCLU), Margeret Payne (NAGALRO), Clare Redrupp (London Borough of Enfield), Dan Lyne (London borough of Enfield), Mark Smith, (London Borough of Bromley), John Mitchell (Ofsted), Beth Munby (Action for Children), Meredith Davis (Action for Children), Winston Morsun (BASW), Allice McCullen (Parent), Belinda Moreau-Jones (Mutual Ventures), Adam Offord (Children and Young People Now), Chris Podszus (Fixers), Maria Stephens (CRAE), Sophie Vessey (CAFCASS), Anya Green (DfE), Kyri Papasavva (DfE), Vincent McGovern (Families Need Fathers), Michael Lewkowicz (Families Need Fathers)

Tim Loughton MP (Chair): Tim explained they are now holding the APPGC AGM.

Page 2 of 17

Baroness Howe: Baroness Howe proposed as co-chairs of the committee: Baroness Howarth

of Breckland and Tim Loughton MP. She asked who was in favour and who was against.

[Parliamentarians present indicated in favour]

Tim Loughton: Tim stated they have other officers to re-elect. There is Francis Listowel as

the Treasurer, Baroness Massey as Secretary and have Baroness Walmsley and Sarah

Champion as Vice-Chairs. He asked that they are re-elected ‘en bloc’. He asked who was in

favour and was against. [Parliamentarians present indicated in favour]. That ended the AGM.

Tim Loughton: The main element of this afternoon is the latest in a series of enquiries into

children’s social care. This is the fifth of six hearings that have been held over several months.

There is a final session in October about accountability and inspection. The APPGC officers

will then decide what further research needs to be done, and then the final report will be

produced. There have also been many written submissions, which will also be published.

Liz Lake: She is a parent of a disabled child, but is here today as a project manager for a

social care project in Bromley. The main aim of the project is to try and improve access for

families to social services. For many of the families, having a disabled child, is the first time

they have been introduced to social services. One service they offer is short breaks. In

Bromley they asked over a hundred parents, schools, professionals from the voluntary sector,

representatives from the local authority, and young people to look at what is currently

happening, what is working well and what is not working so well. They co-produced some

ideas and they are currently testing those ideas in Bromley and hoping to implement them.

She is here with their Young Advisors who have been helping to get feedback from the young

people in Bromley.

Joe Fitton: He facilitates the Young Advisors. He is also disabled. He is a registered learning

disability nurse and social worker and works as an advocate with the Young Advisors. He

passionately believes in early intervention in terms of the advocacy model being a preventative

interaction with people rather than the reactionary model that exists in social work.

Young advisors: [The young advisors introduced themselves].

Young advisor: They are a smaller group of the Young Advisors. There are eight of them

normally. They all use different types of equipment and for example different chairs. The

Young Advisors are given work from Bromley Council and they basically become ‘vultures’.

They ‘tear apart and put together’ what they are asked to look at by Bromley Council.

Young advisor: They aim to reach the highest level of communication with the council in

respect of ensuring that all children’s services act as they are supposed to and to high

standards.

Young advisor: They are very much a consultation group. They gather the opinions of the

young people with disabilities and feed that back to Bromley Council.

Young advisor: They attempt to display their results in more fun ways than just ‘bog standard

reports’.

[A short video of the Young Advisors was shown].

Donna Molloy: She has have been asked to cover three things:

The nature of the evidence for early intervention;

The work of the Early Intervention Foundation (EIF);

Suggestions for how local authorities and central government might be able to

progress this agenda going forward.

Page 3 of 17

There are some features of childhood development that can be improved by effective early

intervention with families. For instance gaps in children’s well-being and development start

early in life and these gaps can be improved by effective intervention. The aim of EIF is to

influence how the system responds to early signals of risk in children’s development and

outcomes. The EIF also thinks about how to use evidence and support the system to use this

evidence.

The initial outcomes EIF have looked at in their work so far, include: cognitive development,

behaviour, speech and language development, attachment and mental health. There are a

range of programmes that have been well evidenced to show their effectiveness in reducing

child maltreatment. These include programmes such as Incredible Years, video feedback and

parent and child psychotherapy. EIF are again reviewing this evidence in partnership with the

Local Government Association and the NSPCC.

EIF are also looking at what local authorities are actually delivering in the child protection

space and comparing that with evidence of what works. Although this evidence exists, and is

well documented, there are not enough examples of places who have implemented these

interventions, that can point to clear reductions in terms of pressures on children’s social care.

EIF have found from their work with local authorities and partners that they may not be

delivering things that have been shown to work. In this context there is a wide range of

influences on local commissioning decisions and how money is spent, including cost, political

necessity and interventions that practitioners like or want to deliver.

There is also a significant lack of evaluation capacity in local areas and it feels like this has

got worse in recent years. The main reason the places EIF work with invest in early

intervention is because they want to see reductions in pressure on the social care system.

However there is actually a lack of local evidence about what is being achieved through

investment in early intervention programmes and approaches. Even if caseloads for children’s

social care go down, often it is difficult to conclude with any certainty if that’s because of early

intervention activity. It is also the case that a lot of the outcomes of early intervention initially

tend to be in terms of processes rather than actually being outcomes. Most of the evidence in

relation to early intervention actually relates to programmes, and very little is known in terms

of the evidence about the system in which those programmes operate and are delivered.

Increasingly, at the current time, many areas are trying to integrate different aspects of their

early intervention services and system, thinking about common assessments and

methodologies, bringing teams together in integrated approaches and whole family working.

However there is very little evidence about what is most effective in terms of these integrated

approaches. The EIF has recently concluded some work for the Department for Education

(DfE) and the Home Office, which looked at a current range of integrated early intervention

approaches from a vast range of different types of local authorities and partnerships. They

looked at 28 different models and asked those areas and those involved in the approaches

how far they were evaluating these approaches or how they get evidence of impact. Only 11

of the 28 reported any evaluation activity. Only four of them were able to say they had evidence

of positive impact. When EIF looked at those evaluations again, a lot of them looked at

processes rather than outcomes for children. It is therefore not know what is most effective in

terms of a lot of integrated inter-agency working locally. The EIF also hears lots of examples

of opportunities for early intervention being missed.

They have also been doing work with a network of police leaders who are interested in how

the police can ‘downstream’ traditional ways of working and support early intervention activity.

What they have heard is a lot of examples of police spotting cases where early intervention is

needed. But a lot of those referrals to multi-agency safeguarding or to children’s social care

Page 4 of 17

resulted in no further action. In Blackpool for instance, 60% of cases which were referred by

the police to children’s social care, following a police call out, where there is an incident of a

child witnessing a domestic abuse incident, had no further action, and half of those were re-

referred within 21 months. There is a big issue of how we are identifying and reaching those

children and families who most need early intervention.

Donna was asked to speak about what could be done to make better use of the evidence on

early intervention. This evidence needs to be clearly set out and made accessible to the local

agencies and partners who might need to use it. It is not just about publishing systematic

reviews and other types of activity. At the EIF they are as interested in experimenting with

ways of disseminating evidence as they are about thinking about reviewing evidence in the

first place. For early invention to realise its potential, use of evidence needs to be encouraged,

as does take up of early intervention approaches by local authorities and their partners. Use

of early intervention must be complemented by central support to actually develop the

evidence and enable new innovation and testing. The evidence for early intervention is still

very under-developed in the UK. Much of the evidence is imported from overseas, and whilst

international evidence is important in providing new insights, there are too few early

intervention approaches that are being tested rigorously here.

There are still many areas for which the science about the need for intervention and the

approaches are strong but there is actually a lack of well-tested programmes and approaches.

To give one example, the EIF recently published some work in April, which looks at the impact

of the quality of inter-parental relationship on outcomes for children and specifically on

parenting. This found that how parents communicate and interact with each other, regardless

of whether they are in a couple or if the relationship is no longer intact, is actually a primary

influence on the quality of the parenting, children’s mental health, education attainment and a

whole range of other important outcomes. Yet too few services still focus on this aspect of the

family system. This is, therefore, new territory for early intervention, which needs central

support to be tested in the UK context. Some of the interventions that have been developed

in this territory are showing real promise overseas but have yet been introduced in this country.

Finally, it does feel now that without sustained support at central and local level the early

intervention agenda is unlikely to deliver the potential and show the impacts that many of those

have long advocated for and want to see.

Isabelle Trowler: Isabelle explained, to understand the state of play there is a need to look at

history a little. In 1995 when she was a social work student, Michael Little and his colleagues

from Dartington, published what became known as ‘The Blue Book’, which involved messages

from research about child protection. It was heavily influential, and a catalyst for service

development, seeking to reduce the numbers of children being put unnecessarily into the

statutory child protection system. Over 20 years later, this inquiry is asking the same question.

Does early intervention effectively help families early enough to stop the need for statutory

action? There is a need to look at what has happened in between. Whilst early help as a

concept has gained significant ground, it has done so in terms of reducing risk rather than

through providing help and support. This has had a number of consequences. The term ‘early

help’ implies that without it, people’s problems will continue to get worse i.e. that future serious

risk will emerge. The inevitable escalation argument is used because it is the most powerful

and emotionally charged argument and has been successfully used to justify increase in

spending in this area. It is a subtle threat to the public, and to the people who hold the purse

strings, of increasingly expensive and problematic social behaviour by those who are not

helped.

Page 5 of 17

It seems entirely logical to step in early and stop the painful trajectory towards child abuse and

neglect. The problem with the escalation argument, is that the focus becomes about de-

escalation of risk, and savings in the statutory part of the system, rather than providing general

welfare services and family support. There is some irony in this situation. If the position is

adopted that the purpose of early help is to prevent late help, the experiment to date has failed,

and the certain savings have by and large not materialised. As Donna said, we are busier at

the statutory end and we are more expensive. However it depends on your definition of

success. If you change the term from ‘early help’ to ‘family support’, then it could be argued

that the investment has been successful because thousands of families will have been helped

and supported. It just hasn’t resulted in stopping the flow into statutory services. The vast

majority of people who access early help will never neglect and abuse their children and will

not even get close to it. Finding those that will, is pretty hit and miss, and the services wouldn’t

necessarily be designed for their specific family circumstances.

The second irony, is that all of the bureaucracy that goes with risk identification and

assessment, well established at the statutory end, has filtered across that boundary and

downwards through the risk continuum. This has had all kinds of knock on effects. At worst

we have less resources used for direct help, and the resources used instead, for administering

a system which is characterised by forms, assessment, meetings, hierarchy and convoluted

decision making. All of the things we are trying to change at the statutory end, are being

replicated elsewhere. This links to Donna’s comment: ‘what do we really understand about

the practise system’? In the news today, the Children’s Commissioner for England talked

about school nurses, and the huge amount of time they are having to spend on administration

and attending meetings. The irony is that those who do abuse and neglect their children are

probably the least likely to access or benefit from early help services currently on offer:

particularly the less targeted provision. The reasons for child abuse and neglect are complex

and we are in our infancy for working out how to reduce those risks once they arise.

The most successful interventions seem to be relationship based, personal, very focused,

intensive, enduring, with a theoretical underpinning, and carried out by well-trained and well-

supervised staff. They won’t necessarily be easily successfully delivered through the wider

family support programmes. What are the solutions to this? What is the role of social worker

within this? There needs to be an understanding there is a massive continuum of risk and

need, and services must differentiate accordingly. Provide general welfare services and help

to families with problems and needs, not because the problems will inevitably get worse, and

parents will end up abusing and neglecting their children, because that is not the case, but

because it is not nice to live with problems and as a society if we can do something about it,

then we should.

This requires a different economic argument for spending in this area. An argument that is

more focused on social justice, fairness, equality and social mobility. That is the bread and

butter of social work. At the heart of what we do, is building relationships with children, families

and communities and helping to plug people back into the support systems that carry them

through temporary or life-long needs or difficulties. At the core of our profession is the belief

in the possibility of change, the power of the individual, and that changes in the system around

the individual can make a profound positive difference to that individual.

Some families will have problems, some of the problems will get worse, and that can lead to

abuse and neglect. We need an equally strong focus on this group of families. The

Government strategy for achieving change in children’s social care, set out in Putting Children

First, provides the detail of that reform agenda. We need to continue to re-design systems,

following on from the Munroe Review in 2011, and learn how to do things differently and

Page 6 of 17

effectively. Learning what works in children’s social care is an important part of that landscape

and should focus not just on individual interventions but the practice system in which they

operate. This reinforces Donna’s point. Early and more targeted and tailored support is

necessary and we must continue to build on current strengths.

An Ofsted thematic inspection report on early help published in 2015 gave some harsh

messages about early help, but also gave examples of great practice, particularly where

particular practice methods and tools were implemented. Since 2011, 66 local authorities have

managed to reduce the proportion of children in care. This indicates that there are some

effective things that are taking place in the system. There are some authorities like Leeds,

Essex and North Yorkshire, using particular practice methodologies, which are having quite a

significant impact on their proportion of children in care. Final evaluations from ‘wave one’ of

the Children’s Social Care Innovation Programme, are not yet published, but it is hoped that

it will demonstrate some examples of good outcomes for children and families, from

approaches that are working. The evidence of what works across the broader landscape, must

be built on, working with organisations like the EIF and Dartington. The impact of some of the

recent work at the EIF can be seen. There is a system of local delivery, so by design, there is

variation, which should be the case. There should be flexibility to meet local need. However

local variation should be tempered by increasing the evidence base, which in turn effects the

thinking and decision making.

In terms of social work training, the first, generic qualification is important because it is about

supporting families and protecting children, but as social workers move into their specialisms

their knowledge and skills need to become more sophisticated to match the range of

complexities of the families’ lives that they work with. National post-qualification accreditation

is the key ‘check and balance’ for public assurance, that those with statutory responsibility, for

our highest risk children, have the necessary knowledge and skills, both at practitioner level,

but also at a more senior level. Practice leaders and practice supervisors have the most

profound impact on children’s lives. There needs to be confidence that the hundred or so

people at the top of the profession have got what it takes. There also need to be support for

social workers at all levels of seniority and help for them to develop their knowledge and skills.

This is why there will be continued funding for newly qualified social workers and also new

funding to support newly appointed practice supervisors and practice leaders.

It would also be good to see more social workers in the early help settings and a confident,

capable, system will help calm the system down. Just because there are social workers in

early help settings doesn’t mean it will become a statutory activity. It just means that there will

be people that are competent in undertaking an assessment and who will help in thinking

through what should happen with families. Social work has a big part to play in this public

service landscape and social workers can offer professional support at any point within the

need and risk continuum.

Michael Little: It is interesting to be reminded of the publication in 1995. It makes one reflect

that at the time Dartington were working on ‘The Blue Book’ they were working on the 1989

Children Act. Both of these were about the relationship between the State and family life. A lot

of the conversation is about that balance and probably about the fact that things are out of

balance. One Dartington paper deals with the relationship between things that are ‘early’.

Taking what Donna and Isabelle have said a little bit further, Dartington distinguish between

‘early intervention’, which is the evidence based things that Donna was talking about, ‘early

help’, which is this low level support from children’s services and ‘early action’ which is

something similar that is provided by civil society and voluntary organisations. Dartington are

interested in the relationship between that early stuff – ‘action’, ‘help’ etc. and expensive high

Page 7 of 17

end public services such as: youth justice; special educational needs; child and adolescent

mental health; child protection and children in care. Two of Darlington’s upcoming papers are

based on evidence that they have collected over the last few years on about 35, 000 children.

He will just focus today on the social care element of that. There is good evidence for early

intervention with some caveats. It has to be the right kind of early intervention, it has to be well

done and it has to be systematised so that it will continually develop. There is good evidence

coming from work of colleagues in the US, in Ireland and in Australia about what makes a

difference to children’s well-being at a population level. He doesn’t think there is good

evidence for early help having that kind of impact and he’d be pretty pessimistic about any

evidence collected showing good outcomes. There isn’t much evidence on early action as a

society activity having impact on outcomes but he’d be more optimistic about that evidence if

it were collected.

Graham Allen MP wrote a report on early intervention. Michael was involved in the drafting of

the first of those reports and agrees with a lot of the things that were said. One thing he would

disagree with is the idea that this early activity can have an impact on budgetary

considerations. The idea that early help or early intervention or early action can reduce

pressure on high end services and therefore save the State money is mistaken. One of his

papers is about why that is and two reasons are advanced. One is that the early systems, as

said in the technical terms, are endogenous, they are not connected to the high end systems.

Different people work in the early help system and they serve different categories of children

and critically the entrance points and the exit points from those systems are not connected.

Activity ‘over here’ isn’t going to affect activity ‘over there’. The second is the mismatch

between these two services. They collected data, as he mentioned, on 35, 000 children. They

were able to match children’s needs with the services they receive. They found that around

22% of these children have what we call significant needs i.e.by definition there will be

impairment to their health and development or likely impairment without some kind of

intervention. Most local authorities have sufficient resources to meet about half of those

children’s needs. The need is always greater than the services’ ability to meet those needs.

That means it’s practically impossible to use early intervention to reduce budget requirements.

Dartington have been working with the start-up charity called: Safe families for children. They

provide an intervention that is an alternative for children coming into care. It predicates the

reduction of flow of children coming into care by 10%. But because of the mismatch,

mentioned earlier, every time they reduce a child going into care, that slot gets taken by

another child, because for every child in care there’s another six with exactly the same

characteristics not yet in care. So, you have to manage the dynamics of the system, as indeed

they are doing, in 20 local authorities. You have to manage those dynamics if you really aim

to get the economic benefits that you’re looking for. One local authority Dartington worked with

had been spending an extra £20million a year on prevention and early intervention compared

to 15 years before. In addition to that they had been spending on children’s centres. The

budget in 2015, the core budget, not including schools was £138million, the core budget in

2020 is predicted to be £68million. Strategy one for that local authority is to eradicate nearly

all of its early help and a lot of its children’s centres. Their question then was: what do you do

in those circumstances?

Dartington experiments with local authorities and then works with them, to find out whether it

makes a difference or not, advancing evidence that is proven. Their current advice to those

local authorities is as follows:

1. Continue to use prevention and early intervention to reduce children’s needs because

there is good evidence that the right kind of intervention will make a difference.

Page 8 of 17

2. Radically reduce the volume of high end services. This is the radical part of it. So in

some local authorities, they will reduce the rate of children in care by 20 to 40%

possibly even 50%.

He has had experience of working in New York City, between 1998 and 2002, where they

reduced as part of a team, the rate of children in care by over 60%. There is a great deal of

variation there. They used those resources to provide better quality prevention and early

intervention. Dartington would like to see a more universal shift to prevention. They would like

to see fewer children drawn into early support systems. They would like to see radically fewer

children in high end systems such as foster care with the goal of giving a smaller group of

children a better service. One of the problems in the relationship between State and family at

the moment is trying to do too little with too many people. It would be better to do more with

fewer children.

He has been hugely impressed, by the work of Andy Dilson and Professor Paul Bywaters in

Coventry. Dilson makes the point very clearly that, since for example the Blue Book, the

proportion of children being drawn into these systems has gone up exponentially by over 80%,

but very few people are getting any actual help. They are getting a few visits from a social

worker. It is unlikely that that is going to make a difference. Bywaters very importantly stresses

the disproportionate burden of that help on families from economically deprived backgrounds.

So, if you are in an average local authority and you are from an economically deprived

background, you are 40 times more likely to get this early help. And if you are in a relatively

well-off local authority in a disadvantaged community in that authority you are 80 times more

likely to get this help. It’s probably likely to be ineffective.

Gerald Meehan: Gerald will talk about some of the positive outcomes of their work over a

number of years. He will make a couple of comments about children’s social care, then talk

about what problems they are trying to solve, what are some of the solutions they came up

with, and actually what difference does it make?

There is an unrelenting demand on children’s social care. That is undeniable. He sees it every

day and it is growing. His local authority have also become much more sophisticated and have

a better understanding of the needs and of ‘complex safeguarding’. They have found early

help on its own doesn’t reduce demand alone. It has got to be part of a wider system. When

he says this he speaks for his colleagues in the NHS, he speaks for his colleagues in the

police, for those who work in the fire service, for those working in planning, all those that do

work with people who are disabled or have a learning difficulty. In his local authority they try

to work as a whole system.

It is the case however that early support, helping families early on with their children, requires

consent when it falls below the statutory trigger. Whether it is in a school or even a social

group, if it doesn’t meet that statutory trigger then they can be told to ‘go away’. For some of

the families that presents some of the biggest risks to children. If they are left, it will cause

future problems. They are the very ones that say no. How can they get to a system where

they can encourage people to engage with them more? They have found, over the last few

years, a great deal of unmet demand and this confirms what has been said at this APPG. It is

a different sort of demand. You can’t ignore it. These families are in need. The statutory

definitions are too tight. In the real world, families need other things to help them survive, to

prosper and to help their children be a success.

When Ofsted visited in December last year, they found that Cheshire West and Chester

children’s services knew their community, knew their children and knew their families.

Importantly their early support systems and processes are as rigorous as their child protection

Page 9 of 17

system. Families’ needs are often are quite complex and difficult and there needs to be a

proper and sustained response to them. In terms of dealing with the resource reductions

across public services, they have consolidated resources together. They are just about to go

out and commission all their children and young people services with colleagues in the NHS.

They will have one set of commissioning because they have less money. It is all

complementary and all serving the same people. They do it together, forget about all those

silos with the Police, the NHS and the council and focus on children. This process has helped

raise the quality overall. There is more humanity in the system as well.

He is going to explain the model they used. Firstly, what is the problem they saw? There were

fragmented services. All of the agencies were working in different ways and sometimes to

different thresholds. There were gaps that people were regularly falling through. They were

regularly seeing poor outcomes for families who fell below the statutory threshold and if they

don’t meet the threshold they got nothing. They didn’t have a lot of money in the council. He

needed to know that every pound that was spent had an impact on children and families, not

on bureaucracy and systems. They also had a high rates of repeat referrals. People coming

in to the system being ‘assessed to death’. The system was spending more time assessing

people than actually trying to help them.

They came up with a solution that has had some degree of success. There is a degree of

nervousness when Ofsted comes in, because when you are at the frontline of trying to do

things differently, there is always an anxiety that maybe Ofsted won’t like it. However Ofsted

liked what they saw and there was positive feedback from some of their parents, who now

volunteer, helping other parents in similar situations. There is now integrated early support.

There is a single place for professionals to contact a family with for instance complex issues

that fall below the statutory thresholds. If they are above the statutory thresholds, if it is child

protection matter, there is a high quality child protection system there. So they have one

access point for all those and that is for all agencies. It doesn’t matter what the need is.

Everyone is in the same room, including social care. The idea is that there is no wrong ‘front

door’. If you come in this ‘door’, supposedly for integrated support, they make an assessment

and if necessary direct them to social care. The process is not about putting people in the

wrong place. This is a very important message for him. The families that come through are all

different and Cheshire West is a big place, with around 75,000/76,000 children. They have an

integrated local case management service. This contains all the services: police, fire, housing,

work and pensions, local voluntary groups and community groups and education welfare

services. They have also spent a lot of time looking at what works and what’s the evidence

base for the interventions they propose to do.

They also have one commissioning process, so that when somebody comes in there is a menu

of the commissioned services they can offer them. For example in the past, they used a

commissioning service call the Quarriers. They provide young people in complex situations

with help around anti-social behaviour, offending, truancy and exclusion. They employ Catch

22 to help recruit volunteers, to help families, to help train volunteers and to help with the home

visiting services. In integrated early support they deal with domestic violence, behaviour issues

and also mental health issues and deal with these issues every day. If the service

commissioned doesn’t work, they don’t commission it again.

They address: what has been the impact? They have reduced their re-referral to social care

by a quarter since 2013. Importantly and un-expectedly they have had a 49% reduction in

crime incidents involving domestic violence. This has had major implications for the police and

most importantly on protecting young people. They have had an 86% reduction in time served

in prison by under 18’s. This is because they put in place integrated early support for troubled

Page 10 of 17

families. They mix and match service provision depending on the particular need. Ofsted saw

a strong partnership at a strategic and operational level.

There is a pressure to have more and more children in care. He works in the North-West of

England. The pressure seems unrelenting. He hears that day in and day out. What they are

trying to do is another preventative model, targeted at those young people where bringing

them into care isn’t going to make their situation better. They are young people who have

different sorts of needs. They set up a team to go into families where they think there is a

prospect of actually keeping them together. It is usually behaviour issues and the young

person is having difficulty at school or getting in to trouble. Often the young people are getting

into trouble. They have seen a 23% decrease in looked after children between the ages of 9

and 15. Out of a hundred children they worked with, only 23 came to care and that was

because they needed to. Care is actually very positive when it is used in the right way. It is not

a negative thing.

Unfortunately, their figures went up because of the nought to eight year olds in care for child

protection reasons. The first thing they learnt is there has to be total ownership by everyone

across Cheshire West and Chester. Everyone has signed up to this in every agency and at

really profound level. Sometimes he ‘knocks on the door’ and says: we need more cash and

we need to do things differently, which can be very difficult. Due to the fact they can

demonstrate impact, they are getting more investment. He also works to include his colleagues

in the third sector, the community sector, and his young people in the process. Their young

people work with them very closely. He thinks in the future they need to continue with a

specialist focus on children’s services. A lot of areas have a sort of ‘reductionist’ model. They

say let’s throw it all together and have one safeguarding rule that fits all the adults and all the

children. In his book, the areas are different. There does need to be a specific focus on children

and it is a retrograde to go down that reductionist approach.

Schools are at the heart of this. They have got some fantastic schools in Cheshire West and

Chester. The schools love the model. The schools were knocking on the door for years and

getting nothing, and now, there is an answer there, is someone who can help the teachers at

that school. It is very important, no matter what their governance that schools are at the heart

of this. It also has to be cross party. They have done everything across political parties. All the

parties are up for this, they all get it. They have spent a lot of time, in difficult financial times,

investing in their workforce. They also need to understand the evidence base. They need to

understand what works, what doesn’t work. The other bit that they have learned, is they need

really good performance information. As the Chief Executive, every month he goes through,

with the head of the safeguard unit, all the statistics in detail. He wants to know if the work is

having an impact

Tim Loughton: There seems to be quite a gloomy response on early intervention and early

help in particular and it is of concern. At the last evidence session, the Director of the Children,

Education and Families Directorate for Oxfordshire, said that Section 17 of the Children Act,

the early help duty, is no longer being fulfilled because the focus was just concentrated on

Section 47 of the Children Act and child protection. Is that a fair assessment? Michael said

that there is no good evidence for the effectiveness of early help. Are we worried about that?

Is that a fair assessment?

Donna Molloy: She has visited lots of local authorities and doesn’t think we can say that

Section 17 has ‘had its day’, because lots of local authorities are investing in early help

services and early intervention programmes. The situation however is ‘patchy’. There are so

many reasons why local authorities are in very different situations. There doesn’t need to be

a ‘blanket’ situation at all.

Page 11 of 17

Michael Little: The lack of use of Section 17 is not empirically true. If you look at the children

in need census, it clearly shows that there are many more children under Section 17 than

under child protection (Section 47). The issue is how families perceive that. He was interested

to hear that at a certain level families have to give their consent. He doesn’t think families

understand that. There is an enormous amount of fear amongst families, that when they are

getting help it is couched in terms of ‘this may escalate’. They worry about losing their children

to the State. The way in which this is couched, the way in which the State interacts with

disadvantaged families is a critical part of this.

Tim Loughton: Donna said that there is not a lot of evidence for early intervention in the UK

and that a lot is imported from overseas. Gerald tells us about the great stuff going on in

Cheshire, and that compared to another authority close by there is a very different picture.

One of the statistics, which we had in an early session, was the divergence of the number of

children in care in the different authorities. This ranged from, Blackpool with a 163 per 10,000,

right the way down to Richmond or one of the other boroughs at 38. This is a huge difference

and it is not just accounted for by leafy Richmond against more deprived Blackpool. Is it

incumbent on the Government centrally to try and get a hold, so that we have the same

standard being applied across the whole of the country, or should we just let the boroughs do

their own thing, even if next door boroughs are doing a much worse job or vice versa?

Michael Little: Only about 10% of the variants in the rates of children and carers are explained

by deprivation. The majority of the variations can be explained by decisions made locally. For

instance people are making different decisions in Blackpool than they are in Newham,

although they share the same rate of deprivation in those two places. Should Central

Government be deciding what those rates are? That doesn’t seem very sensible, but a lot of

the knowledge about how systems work has been lost, including flows in and flows out. There

is a lack understanding from local authorities that they actually decide the rate. If local

authorities understood that, they may choose to have higher numbers or they may choose to

have low numbers. The perception however is that they are being driven by external need and

they are not.

Baroness Howarth: There is a debate here about whether or not we should take some of the

legislative controls off, making it easier for local authorities to make different decisions. There’s

divided opinion about this, as to whether this will bring greater consistency of behaviour, in

terms of local authorities following those things that do actually work, or whether people will

just do what is easiest. Also whether less legislative controls would lead to more privatisation,

or whether it would give greater freedom to local authorities, who can then operate in a much

clearer way based on the evidence. That is a very key issue at the moment and it is going to

be debated extensively in the Children and Social work Bill. Do the witnesses have a view

about that? Consistency versus freedom to act is a very difficult and topical thing.

Gerald Meehan: The way that he would do it practically is that the custodian of standards is

our safeguarding. He has repeatedly tested his standards and is sure that the standards

across agencies are at the right level. This does not mean to say they can’t work on them

around the margins. He uses that rather than having an arbitrary ‘such and such proportion

of children in care per 10, 000 of the population’. Every area is different and everyone will tell

you, ‘we are slightly different for this reason.’ It needs to be about the child and the child’s

needs and the standards used. He is a great believer in standards. He uses his data to

understand the minimum standards that they are working to.

Tim Loughton: Do you know what the number for children in care in your authority is?

Gerald Meehan: It is around 560. It’s 76.5 per 10,000.

Page 12 of 17

Tim Loughton: So you’re in the middle of the range.

Gerald Meehan: The average for the Northwest is 75 per 10,000, and they are at 76. Their

statistical neighbours, including Cheshire East, are around 45 per 10,000.

Tim Loughton: That is quite a big divergence. The divergence that he quoted is by a margin

of 4 to 5 times which is a huge divergence. Is it fair to say that it should be a sign of success

if you have got fewer children in care? In the Hackney Model they reduced the number of

children in care by a half. There was also high quality work being undertaken i.e. those kids

who were not taken into care, who might have been, were safe. Being safer was ’a given’.

Should there be recommendations, greater central recommendation as to the levels of children

in care? So it can be said ‘Hold on! Something went wrong there. You are completely out of

kilter. How can that be justified?’. The biggest thing that has come out of inquiry so far is a

huge range and divergence in practice in proportion of children in care. Michael pointed out it

is not just about deprivation levels. How can we justify such a different approach to children

by postcode? Should the Government essentially be doing more to try and bring rates of

looked after children closer together. Also an issue is the dissemination of best practice.

Michael Little: It is extraordinary but it is not known what the impact of taking disadvantaged

children into care is on their long term behaviours. Given the nature of that intervention and

how intrusive it is, this should be known. There are local authorities, some for good reasons,

some for economic reasons, which want to radically reduce the rates of children in care. In

New York City there were 50,000 children in State care and this was reduced to 18,000. That

is the amount of variation that there can be in a single system. In New York there were no

more scandals. The system was under control. The children that were coming into care were

probably getting a better deal. However there was not an evaluation of outcomes. He would

like to see local authorities being given permission to make radical changes and these

changes being evaluated. Theoretically, maybe more children need to be taken into care, or

maybe far less need to be taken in to care, but this needs to be found out.

Donna Molloy: It is not just about looked after children. There is an equivalent debate about

what is better in terms of children who are just entering the children’s social care system, i.e.

Section 17 children in need, and children who were assessed and no further action is taken.

It is questioned whether those children are most appropriately supported by social workers or

by the wider early help and early intervention architecture. Practitioners need to have

confidence that they are working safely, setting risk in the most appropriate way. Some people

are just not feeling safe or confident enough to work with families in the way they might best

be able to do. Many local authorities are looking at whether they can work with Section 17

children with different sorts of models. It does feel like an important site for innovation.

Lord McNally: He served on Lord Laming’s committee and there was very strong evidence

about the impact of the Baby Peter case on the numbers of children in care. One is tempted

to believe that there are many, many children in care that could be better cared for in the

community with different support. Though the consequences of one going wrong is so

massive, and that has to be thought through. Until Gerald mentioned it, not one of the panel

mentioned the Troubled Families Initiative. The Government has put a lot of political, and

indeed financial, capital into that initiative. What lessons should be learnt from it? He is

Chairman of the Youth Justice Board: all his statutory responsibilities are with children who

are already in the criminal justice system. However every bit of evidence they see is that, if

you are going to really get into the problems of offending you have got to go upstream. He is

worried if there is a lack of evidence, because he is told constantly that their policies have got

to be evidence based. If he can’t produce the evidence, he can produce the instinct that going

Page 13 of 17

upstream is the way to do it. He believes early intervention is the way to address these issues

for children. If they aren’t intervened with early they end up being an enormous cost to society.

Why isn’t Blackpool looking at other areas with similar problems that do it better? Is there no

machinery within the system, for instance in the Local Government Association, to share best

practice?

Tim Loughton: Those present are not picking on Blackpool. They just happen to be on top of

the range for children in care.

Isabelle Trowler: It is a really complex picture. In terms of the postcode lottery it has to be

borne in mind that there is a whole range of different decisions going on. There is a group of

children coming into care and staying in care, because they cannot live at home again and it

is due to really, really serious heavy end stuff. The threshold for decision making about that

group of children wouldn’t be that different across the country. Where there is a real difference,

is with most of the kids that are worked with, which is ones in the grey area. Different local

authorities will have a different attitude to what care is. Actually care is one service, among a

whole range of other support services to families. We shouldn’t think that there are local

authorities which are not acting when they should. The real central mechanism for working out

when local authorities aren’t doing what they should be doing, is the inspection framework,

and that is the central mechanism to assess whether good decisions are being made by local

authorities or not.

There is a connection between the power to innovate and decisions made about looked after

children. It is very bound up with the capability and confidence of people making those

decisions. The reason, she believes, for the power to innovate and test new ways of running

practice systems, is so that the professional judgement of the people who hold statutory

responsibility for children in need and children in public care can be trusted. The question

exists of whether it would increase inconsistency but it is actually a small number of authorities

who would test different ways of doing things. This would happen on behalf of the rest of the

country rather than making pretty sweeping changes across the whole system and not really

knowing what the consequences are. The people who have be most likely to test different

ways of working would be the group of authorities that we’d appoint as partners in practice. It

would be a case of working with the increasing numbers of local authorities that have proved

strong leadership and working out what it is that makes them good. Also working with them as

a group to have a much more forensic exploration of their practice systems and what they do

and what they don’t do. This would include who they employ and the sorts of decisions that

they take. That intelligence then starts to spread throughout the rest of the system.

Tim Loughton: Nothing has changed since the Munroe Review. Now there is a big spike

again in social worker vacancies. What has gone wrong, that the lessons of Munroe have not

been learnt? Even with the additional prerequisites that are supposed to have come in to effect

with Munroe, there are still huge divergences in certain local authorities. Why have some local

authorities proved better at retaining good people and others haven’t?

Isabelle Trowler: You need a national infrastructure to drive a reform agenda. That is what

Putting Children First does and it is really the first time there has been a systematisation of

some of the reforms that we want to see. In local authorities, it would be interesting to see

what an improved situation is like, but in general local authorities that have a calm system,

have reasonable caseloads, have investment in professional development, have sound

supervision, where there is a collective sense of responsibility for risks and decisions that have

been made, they will keep their staff. These local authorities don’t have staff haemorrhaging

from their services. It is known what conditions are needed for recruiting and retaining social

Page 14 of 17

workers and the partners in practice do it. It is about doggedly pursuing that line of enquiry

and making sure that focus isn’t lost.

Tim Loughton: It is not new. It is not rocket science. Should there be some central limit on

caseloads? Dave Pilon of Hermetic gave a really interesting example. When he arrived there

were caseloads of 40 or so. He got in all the social workers and asked them to name all their

cases and when they started to scratch their heads a bit, they got to about 15, 16 or 17, that

was the sort of threshold for a manageable caseload. It sounds very crude but it’s a helpful

way of thinking. There are still huge divergences between caseloads in different local

authorities. After all this time, after all the Munroe recommendations, why are the lessons still

not being learnt and why should Government not be taking a more central, hands-on approach

in some of those authorities that are consistently underperforming?

Donna Molloy: In terms of if there is a central repository or clearing house for this: there are

a number of bodies that are trying to fulfil that role. The EIF was set up, to provide information

on what works for local authorities and for those that are trying to deliver these approaches

and report to the bodies that are in this space. In relation to Troubled Families, she has a close

interest having been very closely involved in a previous life. Her view is that actually a lot of

projects are being spearheaded through Troubled Families. Projects such as those working

on reducing fragmentation, bringing together all of the agencies that are involved with the very

complex families, so that there is a single approach and a single worker who takes control of

the family, with a relentless focus on helping that family, even if they tell them they are not

interested and to go away. Persistence is really important. There is however lots of debate

now about whether the Troubled Families programme has delivered the results and impact

that was hoped for. The fundamental point of recognition is that Troubled Families is not a

single programme, like a parenting programme such as Incredible Years. Troubled Families

was a payment by results mechanism and local authorities have developed a multitude of

different approaches that have been delivered under that broad Troubled Families banner.

Some of them have worked brilliantly and she has seen many of them first hand. There have

been some that have been less effective. It’s the nature of the way that interventions in a

central programme were delivered. However certainly the government’s focus on that cohort

and the funding that was made available was a very good thing.

Michael Little: In defence of Blackpool, they have a fantastic Chief Executive. Dartington

have worked with him to make a £100 million investment, with lottery funding, in prevention

and early intervention. He hopes they are going to work with Dartington bringing those care

numbers down. The role of Central Government implicitly, and particularly the role of Ofsted,

has to be really important here. Do local authorities feel confident, to be able to reduce volume

and to reduce bureaucracy? If local authorities want to get caseloads down to 15, are they

feeling that they are able to do that? Are they confident that they are not going to get clobbered

by someone in Whitehall or someone in Ofsted? That has to be a part of this discussion.

Compared to 1989 when Dartington did the Blue Book the situation is radically different. The

way in which the civil service works and the way in which Government works, in framing these

issues, is completely different today.

Tim Loughton: It would be interesting to know what our young advisors think. The young

advisors’ experience is early intervention through Short Breaks and the early help that they

get as young people with disabilities and the support their families can get with that. Do you

think that this support has been falling? Are you getting fewer offers of short breaks and other

support? Do you think that is a false economy or have Bromley been consistently very

supportive?

Page 15 of 17

Young Advisor: Bromley provided short break services when she was a lot younger but now

that she is 23 not so much. She is not in the services anymore.

Tim Loughton: You help other young people who use the services?

Young Advisor: She has done in the past but not at the moment

Young Advisor: He feels that the bureaucracy is causing a major drawback in the services

offered to some people because assessments take up the majority of the valuable time and

the young people are actually needing help. How are the local authorities at the moment

ensuring that bureaucracy is not affecting the level and the standards of assistance offered?

Tim Loughton: That is a very good point. There was the point earlier about the amount of

time and resources which were spent on doing the assessments which can actually be more

than the follow up that goes into providing the help and support. Is that an experience that you

have, Liz?

Liz Lake: Our children are disabled youngsters and they are ‘normal’ functioning families.

They just happen to have a disabled child. However, because of legislation they are

considered a child in need and they therefore get put into this raft of bureaucracy and social

workers. All they want is a bit of extra help, such as a short break. They get a full social worker

assessment and actually do they need that? One of the things that Bromley are looking at is

doing an online referral system for Short Breaks. When it’s a child protection issue the case

goes somewhere else. It’s about having confidence that schools and the voluntary sector are

going to pick up on child protection, rather than just having a social worker coming into the

house once or twice a year. The feedback Bromley have got is very positive. That is what

parents want, that is what professionals want and it is what the young people want as well.

Tim Loughton: Do you think it is overkill in terms of all the assessments of everybody? They

don’t need to be treated that differently. They just want that extra bit of help.

Liz Lake: These families are ‘normal’ families who just happen to have additional needs. An

example we have is a parent went to a hospital with a sibling and was asked, ‘does your family

have a social worker?’. They replied ‘Yes, we do. But it is not because of this child.’ There is

a whole connotation about having a social worker.

Young advisor: It is also the stigma. When they are with a group of your peers and their peers

say: ‘do you have a social worker?’ and they have to reply: ‘yes, but not because my parents

are awful.’ Everyone thinks because someone has got a social worker: ‘what have your

parents done?’ It is not that at all. Children’s services have got to implement the correct support

at the correct level.

Young advisor: If a child has additional needs that can’t be seen, then this is also difficult for

them. It is different for those where as it is quite obvious, for instance, they are in a wheelchair.

Young advisor: Communication is also an issue. Some people in some cases find

communication a very heavy barrier or an obstacle that they can’t get over.

Tim Loughton: It is very stigmatising and very embarrassing at times.

Liz Lake: This is a really good example of what could be done, with the power to innovate.

With that power, they could test what it is like to take families, who have children with

disabilities, out of the existing legislative framework and do something different. Rather than

just wipe out that law now, without understanding what the consequences of that would be,

let’s work within the local authority, work with service users, test what happens over two or

Page 16 of 17

three years and then make a judgment about if that is in everybody’s interest. That is a

beautiful example of what they are trying to do.

Gerald Meehan: The relationship of a young person or young adult who is disabled is totally

different to a child who may have been abused. It would be a great opportunity to reflect on

that in legislation because I think it does bring an unfair stigma. The legislation gives us an

opportunity to reflect on that. Importantly though young people must not lose their rights,

because is the responsibilities of the State to assess and make sure their needs are met.

However there must be a way to bring humanity into it to say, ‘this is what it feels like for us.

It’s unpleasant, I feel stigmatised, I don’t want it!’. How does the State articulate that in a way

that doesn’t remove the rights, which are so important for people who have fought so very

hard over the years to get them?

Michael Little: A key message to take away from this meeting is ‘it is not because my parents

are awful’. This captures the guidelines we have got. When the legislation from ’86, ’87, ’88,’89

through to ’91 was implemented, it wasn’t set up to create that. The legislation was set up to

create the opposite. He does not believe social workers are bound by legislation, to behave in

these ways. There is freedom there to innovate but there are constraints. He doesn’t think it

is a legislature problem. The legislature was set up to stop exactly what has just been

described.

Baroness Howarth: What Munroe and Isabelle have both said, that you actually must enable

social workers to do the job that they have been trained to do, which is about relationships,

and actually working alongside the people that they want to help. Rather than being bound by

common assessment framework and a set of procedures. We need social work without the

stigma.

Earl of Listowel: Having spent some time with the practitioners from Finland, it is really

encouraging what Isabelle Trowler said about the professionalisation of social work. The

Finnish focus on professionalisation of the children’s workforce and training in theoretical

understanding. The question arises of whether we need a children’s workforce development

strategy, to really build on and understand child development. There is also the question: how

does the impact and the availability of appropriate housing influence social work and effective

intervention? Also what is the impact of early intervention on productivity? This is something

politicians are very concerned about at moment. Might we be more effective, in spending our

energies, rather than on changing our education system to offer grammar schools, instead on

supporting families early on, so that children are ready to learn when they are in school? What

is the evidence in terms of impact on productivity?

Margaret Payne (NAGALRO): She celebrated 40 continuous years in child care social work

a week ago. She has also practised 30 years as a guardian. When ‘every child matters’, the

ones that matter can get overlooked. There is a legacy of over-ambition, of trying to do too

much, for too many, for too long. We have got to start ‘cutting our coats according to our cloth’

and focussing on children that actually need to be considered at a very early stage. A lot of

the cost to local authorities are from the 9 to 15 group, where, had there been effective social

work practice and integrated focus on these families at an early stage, some of these children

may well have been removed and placed in permanent alternative placements or with family

members. It would be good if the special guardianship assessment framework functioned

properly. If there was a focus on on the youngest children, money could be save and this could

be far more effective than trying to spread our net too far.

Page 17 of 17

Tim Loughton: It was a really helpful session and some really interesting points have come

out of it. It has raised a lot of additional questions which we will have to somehow try and focus

in the inquiry.