The Association of Directors of Children's Services' (ADCS) new Interim Safeguarding Pressures 8 report couldn't be clearer: £778m extra is needed simply to ‘stay still' in the provision of children's social care.
And staying still isn't an option, with the latest children in need data showing a 4.1% rise in the number of children deemed to be in need since last year, and ADCS suggesting the full impact of the cost of living crisis is yet to be felt by families and services already exhausted by the pandemic.
Concern about the growing chasm between the support needed by families and the funding available for it has been expressed by increasingly diverse organisations since austerity took hold in 2010, with even the Competition and Markets Authority admitting the children's social care ‘market' is not sustainable. No one working with children believes more austerity will be anything but harmful.
However, while councils call for long-term, sustainable funding in principle, and reports such as the Care Review suggest specific amounts of money needed to plug gaps in the immediate term, calls from those thinking about how this funding should be distributed focus on the need for councils to predict with more accuracy the future needs of children and families in their area – the better to ‘shape the market' or otherwise invest in services – as though anticipating families' needs is an exact science. In fact, councils are involved in changing the lives of children and families right now, whereas predicting how they might evolve is the result of an infinitely complex interplay of human characteristics, environmental changes, service responses and indeed the actions or inaction of the local authority itself.
How about, instead of demanding councils hone skills in an almost mythical science – with funding then being held hostage to their predictions – finance for children and families' services was attached to the (robust, well-regarded) legal duties they're striving to fulfil?
A Children Act Funding Formula would distribute Government funding to every local authority so they could support every ‘child in need' by definition. Calculated according to their child population; the number of young carers and number of children with a disability, and the multiple deprivation index for the area, the grant would be predictably allocated over a multi-year period.
As flexible as Section 17 itself, the funding could be invested in whatever local children and families say they need, and what the law says they are entitled to.
Chloe Darlington is Policy and Communications Manager at Children England
@childrenengland
