Opinion: Stable homes cannot be built on love alone

Rob Finney, Chief Operating Officer at Tristone Healthcare – an organisation committed to the growth of social care companies – shares his views on the governments latest Children’s Social Care Strategy, claiming authorities have buttered people up by using the term ‘love’ in an attempt to disguise their poor funding plans. 

Love: an incredibly powerful and purposefully emotive word. However, it’s fair to say, it’s a word that I didn’t quite expect to see in the title of the government’s recently published Children’s Social Care Strategy and consultation.  

Some may agree it’s a clever use of a word that’s intended to draw an almost instant emotional response, diverting people’s attention from the clear lack of practical resource and investment that this would entail. Put simply, the ‘Looked After Children’ system is not about love; it is about care and protection.

Since qualifying as a social worker in 1990, and throughout my career, I’ve never pretended to love any child I’ve worked with – even those I worked with very closely over long periods. The only time love should come into the equation is in long-term fostering / kinship care. Whilst the government review covers this, it’s merely a fraction of the children’s services system. 

Setting semantics aside for a moment – the unmistakable void that struck me when reading through the government’s response to the Children’s Social Care Independent Review is the lack of financial support that’s being put behind the proposed reforms.

The investment promised in the strategy totals just £200m – a mere fraction of what’s needed according to the original review. That figure was £2.6bn. I can’t help but wonder what Josh MacAlister, Chair of the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, is thinking now.

What’s more, the pilot that’s proposed within the strategy, which pledges to keep children in care closer to their families and friends and improve poor working conditions social workers are facing, will only be available to a very limited number of local authorities, making this all feel far from the ‘once in a generation opportunity to transform children’s social care’ that the sector has been promised.

As an example of the clear gap in funding that’s proposed, let’s look at Pillar 1: Family help provides the right support at the right time so that children can thrive with their families.

Before the Spending Review of 2010, each local authority had a significant level of spending directed at early intervention services to reduce the number of children entering the ‘Looked After Children’ system.

Sadly, this has been drastically reduced over time, as it was non-statutory, with one of the outcomes being a significant increase in the looked after children population year-on-year since then. Pillar one of the proposed new strategy does not reverse any of those funding decisions.

As part of the proposed reforms, it suggests that only 12 local authority areas will run pilots to change how early intervention is delivered. This will include £45m of funding – a shadow of what was being spent on Sure Start Children’s Centres and other early help initiatives. It feels like a backward step from a funding perspective.

One of the interesting ideas here is to give case holding responsibilities to professionals other than social workers. There’s little more detail offered so far, but careful consideration needs to be given to ensure that this is an innovative, safe practice, rather than a watering down of social work influence.

And while there are other interesting ideas set out across the six pillars of change detailed in the strategy, there needs to be careful consideration of the feasibility of implementing these changes and the actual level of investment required, to ensure they can deliver truly innovative and safe social care practice for children, families and staff.

The MacAlister review made it very clear that billions of pounds worth of funding was needed to truly reform the children’s social care system, where there are clear failings happening for children across the country.

However, I would argue that these failings can be attributed to poor leadership, poor investment, and high staff turnover due to social work being a high demand, relatively low paid job. Finding solutions to this must be key if we are to see a significant increase in the quality of how we deliver children’s services.

And so, unless the government drastically rethinks the investment it’s proposing within the strategy, I feel it’s going to be yet another missed opportunity to make long-term, sustainable change.

Photo by Rod Long and Xavier Mouton Photographie