At the Local Government Group annual conference last month, The MJ and iMPOWER gathered a group of chief executives, members and other senior local government officers together to ask them: ‘With the change in the landscape of children's services, even more pronounced since the Baby P case, where do we go now with children's social services?'
The Local Government Group annual conference was the venue for The MJ's first-ever ‘Live Lab'. Sponsored by iMPOWER, participants came together to debate the issues of improving outcomes and reducing costs for looked-after children.
There was, she said, a question about how we carried out inspection within the sector. Currently, Ofsted looks at where councils are going wrong, and inspect what is being done. Should the inspectorates look at things in a different way? Should they help exchange best practice, and focus on the positives, rather than the negatives?
Croydon LBC's deputy chief executive, Nathan Elvery, asked: ‘What is the outcome we are trying to achieve for our looked-after children. All those agencies, yet where is their focus? If Ofsted as an inspection is focused on checking the balances that social workers undertake, it drives the services in a particular direction. That direction is more risk-averse.'
The chief executive of Luton Council, Trevor Holden, claimed we focused on box-ticking, rather than the outcome we wanted for looked-after children. If we wanted to improve outcomes, we needed to move away from ‘performance management and process', and we needed to ‘liberate' the workforce to allow them to do their jobs better. ‘It's about empowering those people who wouldn't do the job, but for the fact it is a vocation for them. Don't constrain them, liberate them.' In addition, he said services should focus on the family unit more, and ensure they concentrated on getting things right first time. ‘If you can provide intervention to get things right first time, you don't have repeat visits,' he said. As a result, services would be far cheaper. ‘Every time something goes wrong someone says, "Well, we need to put more rules in place to make sure it doesn't go wrong again". In reality, that's just a back-covering exercise,' he added.
Cabinet member for children's services at Lincolnshire CC, Trish Bradwell, agreed there needed to be more support for the professionals – and that someone must be aware of the number and complexity of their caseloads. ‘Social workers on the frontline need to know they have someone behind them who is going to be there for them.'
Ms Donnellan claimed the current financial climate was a chance to make changes for the better: ‘There's an opportunity now to take stock of the different initiatives that have been coming down… where we have overlapping services and we haven't always assessed which of these actually make a difference.'
She added: We don't give ourselves enough time to find what's working before the next initiative comes down the line.' However, there were problems associated with the cuts too. ‘There's a danger of how you engage and support very deprived communities without resources.'
Acting director of the NLGN, Anna Turley, also warned about the dangers surrounding cuts but, she added: ‘So many of our public services are so expensive because they are crisis-led.' She called for early intervention – and a more positive form of intervention than was usually the case now. She pointed out that people did have ambitions for their children, and as a result, they would work with social services if they thought they could achieve those ambitions.
Philip Simpkins, chief executive of Bedford BC, asked: ‘Do we need to look at where children's social care sits in local government?' While it was shifted to a children's services department alongside education just a few years ago, he questioned whether it should go back to a social services department which considered the whole family as a single unit, rather than just the child.
Paul Blantern, chief executive of Northamptonshire CC, claimed a lot of the agenda was about ‘helping a community to help itself' and ‘giving a child and their family back their self-esteem'.
He described a ‘turf war' of professionals, all ‘hovering around families' trying to work with them to make things better. Instead, there should just be one point of contact. He asked: ‘Are we really doing the best for our children now. We are the corporate parents. Are we really saying their life chances are as good as if they were our own children?'
Barking and Dagenham LBC's finance director, Tracie Evans, pointed out the cost of care – and the cost of trying to avoid risk. For a single family, there could be countless professionals working with them, all running up man-hours and the associated costs.
But Cllr Bradwell told the debaters that, in Lincolnshire, there would be a ‘lead professional', a single person responsible for the families. ‘The new way of working is to put families at the heart of this. It's about helping the families out and not having too many professionals in there.'
Mr Elvery pointed out: ‘We have a lot of families out there who find looking after children quite difficult… sometimes you need the simplest of things to help them through that.'
That may be about granting planning permission for an overcrowded family –or even just helping them to buy bunk beds.
He claimed the current way of working ignored the environment we were in. For example, in a recession, the pressures on families could be greater. ‘Are we asking families what we can do to alleviate those things?' He added: ‘I like the expression looked-after families – I think it's a good one.'
Mr Holden claimed we could no longer continue to just accept that the volume of social care was just going to keep rising. At some point, that needed to stop. But more than that, we also needed to consider how we talked about – and measured – success and failure.
‘We disenfranchise a whole range of young people who believe that, because they haven't got four A-levels and a degree, they are not a success. We should be changing the language of success to being around being a worthwhile citizen.' He talked about ‘recognising success in its many guises' and later the concept of success, as being measured by celebrity, was also raised.
iMPOWER's Jeremy Cooper agreed: ‘It is not the number of kids in care that counts, it's about the outcomes for those children and to ensure they have a better life than if they had not been taken into care.
‘The starting point is about opportunity and outcomes.'
In conclusion, Martin Cresswell, chief executive at iMPOWER, said: ‘There were a number of common threads evolving from this Live Lab debate that have been discussed for some time.
‘It shows the need for robust management and leadership from officers and members alike, which are focused at enabling valuable frontline staff to support vulnerable children and families in the most effective way possible.
‘We need effective operational performance management that ensures preventative action works, and that the process and systems that cause delays are scrapped.
‘Managers must have accountability for their teams, for making sure action is taken swiftly and that resources constantly respond to the changing demands in their communities.
‘We need to stop talking and start acting. The answers can't come from government – they must be developed locally, if services are to survive and safeguarding improved in these difficult times of austerity.'
To watch the Live Lab webinar, go to www.LocalGov.co.uk/impower.
