Children’s social care plays an invaluable role in supporting and
protecting the most vulnerable children.
Here’s what you need to know about our ambitious plans to reform
support for children in care and the children’s social care
system.
What are you doing to improve the children’s social care
system?
Backed by £200 million over the next two years, ‘Stable Homes, Built on
Love’ is the government’s plan for how we make the children’s
social care system work better.
Families and loving relationships are at the heart of the plan,
with a focus on early help and support for those that are
struggling.
How will the new plan support vulnerable children and
families?
The plan is a move away from the current model of
intervention to focus instead on effective early help and support
within families.
Proposals in the strategy include a trialling a new Family Help
programme which will provide joined-up help for families needing
support with issues such as domestic abuse or poor mental health.
At the moment, when families need help from children’s
social care, they often go through lots of meetings with
different people. The earlier we help a struggling family, the
less likely their problems will worsen, and the less likely
children will be taken into care.
Where a child is at risk of serious harm, child protection will
be more decisive and effective. In the future, social workers,
nurses, doctors, police officers and teachers will work better
together to keep children safe. They should talk to children,
their parents and family members about how best they can
help.
When a child can’t live with their parents, the social workers
will look to help extended families, such as grandparents,
aunties and uncles to provide stable homes for children in what
are known as ‘kinship care’ arrangements or look to place
children in high quality foster placements.
What is kinship care and how does this plan support
that?
If children can’t live with their parents, they should live
with someone they already know, love and trust if it is possible
and safe – this is called kinship care.
We want to give more help to children and their kinship carers.
We plan to test new ways of supporting kinship care and children
with ‘Family Network Support Packages’ in up to 19 different
parts of the country. These packages are different types of help
that local authorities can give to kinship carers, like helping
them build an extra bedroom or giving them some extra money to
pay for things a child needs.
We will also offer training to all kinship carers in the country
to support them in caring for a child.
What about children and young people that need to be
placed in care? What support will there be for
them?
We want to support children to stay with their families.
But even with greater help for families, sometimes children need
to come into care to keep them safe.
In cases where wider family is unable to offer support, the
strategy will create a care system that provides the same love
and stability that all children deserve with plans to attract
more foster carers to provide a loving home.
For foster care, we are investing £25 million over the next two
years in a recruitment and retention programme, which is the
largest investment in recent history. Depending on local need,
foster care recruitment will focus on areas where there is a
particular shortage of placements for children such as sibling
groups, teenagers, unaccompanied asylum seeking children (UASC),
those that have suffered complex trauma or parent and child
foster homes.
Foster carers will also see an above-inflation increase in their
allowance to help cover the increasing costs of caring for a
child in their home, in recognition of the brilliant care they
provide to children.
What about support for
social workers?
We want every child who needs one to have a great social worker.
They can change the lives of children for the better.
To make that happen, we need to support them more and they need
to know how valued they are.
We plan to increase the number of people becoming social workers
and give existing social workers more and better
training. We want to recruit 500 new child and family social
worker apprentices and we are introducing a framework to support
social workers early in their career.
We also want to reduce the amount of office work social workers
do so they can spend more time with children and families and
help social workers stay working at the same place for longer -
this will mean children don’t have to tell their life stories
lots of times.
