Those of you who know me will be aware that reforming children's social care is a personal passion of mine. I wrote about it for ConservativeHome last year.
For far too long the system has let down the most vulnerable members in our society, with poor process management at the heart of what should be a caring, child-centred system.
The news earlier this week that the Government are bringing forward much-needed reform was very welcome.
Stable Homes, Built on Love
In 2019, the Conservatives made a manifesto pledge to review the children’s social care system, and ensure children in the care system enjoy the love and stability most of us take for granted. Every child also deserves to have the best protection possible to prevent the horrific abuse seen in the heart-breaking cases of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson.
That is why the Government have announced their new ambitious reforms to children’s social care, getting families the early help they need, integrating our child protection system, supporting foster and kinship carers, supporting care leavers, and hiring more social workers.
The strategy will strengthen protections for children, ensuring every child can grow up in a safe and loving environment, giving them the very best start in life.
The Conservatives are doing this by:
- Investing £200 million into children’s social care by 2024-5. They have committed to invest £200 million into children’s social care including £45million to trial models of early Family Help and multiagency child protection work in 12 different local areas and £30 million on family finding, befriending and mentoring programmes to find and maintain loving relationships.
- The largest investment in foster carers and kinship carers in recent history. Children should have the option to stay with their extended family, or loving foster parents. That is why they are investing £9 million into kinship care training and £25 million into foster carer recruitment and retention, as well as providing an above-inflation increase to the foster carer national minimum allowance boosting it by 12.4 per cent.
- Boosting social worker recruitment and taking steps to recruit up to 500 more child and family social worker apprentices, giving social services the resources that they need. As part of the work to ensure social services are properly resourced they are boosting social worker recruitment and exploring ways to support the recruitment of up to an additional 500 child and family social worker apprentices nationally.
- Introducing new oversight of the finances of children’s homes. They will stop private providers making high profits off the backs of the most vulnerable children in society by introducing a new system to create transparency and drive out cases of price gouging in children’s care.
- Improving opportunities for care leavers. They are increasing the Care Leaver’s grant from £2,000 to £3,000 and tripling the Care Leaver’s apprenticeship bursaries to £3,000.
This funding is the beginning of long-term plan to transform children’s social care and it comes on top of the £3.2 billion extra funding for social care (adults and children) that was set out for local government at the Autumn Statement.
These welcome reforms are just the start of what's needed to ensure these children are protected, loved and helped to thrive. I look forward to monitoring progress and supporting future changes to keep the reform process moving in the right direction - we must not drop the ball on this.
Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash
