Help families avoid crisis, urges care review

A review of councils’ children’s care services has been warned that tens of thousands more children could end up in care without drastic changes to child protection in England.

The Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, described as “once in a generation”, is assessing the intervention with struggling families who are reaching crisis point.

The review’s lead, Josh MacAlister, called for £2.6 billion in funding over five years to prevent the number of children in care exceeding 100,000. Other recommendations include:

• New child-protection experts to ensure senior staff are directly involved in frontline decisions
• A recruitment drive to increase the number of foster parents who can care for children
• A new law protecting care leavers from discrimination
• Young offender institutions, described as “wholly unsuitable for children”, to be phased out

MacAlister told the BBC:

“I’ve walked away from this feeling a mixture of inspiration at times – seeing what families have been able to do and where children have been able to get despite the circumstances – but also rage.

Some of the things going on in the system are outrageous and are not acceptable.

Carry on as we are and we’ll have nearly 100,000 children in care by this time next decade, and the costs per year will be £15bn [up from £10bn]… and it won’t be achieving better outcomes for anybody.

What we found is that this is a system – the children social care system – that needs a radical reset, because at the moment it is in a cycle where problems escalate, costs rise, outcomes continue to be too poor, and that’s getting worse and worse over time.”

The review follows the killing of toddlers Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson, who died in two separate incidents in 2020, with the trials exposing the shortcomings of the children’s care systems supposed to safeguard them.