Northumberland County Council is preparing to implement a new children's social care system that prioritises prevention, with the aim of keeping families together and reducing costly interventions. The changes, part of the Government's "family first" reforms, are designed to provide support "at the earliest point of need", with benefits including improved access to support and more consistent relationships with support.
Biggest change in a generation
The Government has described the reforms as the "biggest overhaul of children's social care in a generation". The new system is expected to be rolled out from February next year. Speaking at a meeting of the council's family and children's services scrutiny committee, the council's head of social care safeguarding Patrick Boyle said: "I have been in social work for 30 years and this is the biggest change I have ever experienced. We've spend 18 months preparing for this."
"It is an overhaul of the system, rebalancing it so there is a much stronger focus on early family help to prevent things from escalating, whilst keeping children safe. This is huge, it's challenging," he added. "I think we're well placed in terms of implementing. There's always something to be done, we always want to be aspiring to do better."
New multi-agency teams and support
Under the act, new multi-agency child protection teams will bring together social workers, police, health and education professionals to strengthen safeguarding for vulnerable children. Families will be supported to stay together wherever possible. Where this cannot be done, support for kinship carers will be strengthened so that more children can be cared for by grandparents, aunts and uncles rather than going into care.
In addition, foster care capacity will be increased and Regional Care Cooperatives expanded to help get more children in care into supportive foster homes with the support networks they need.
Addressing cost pressures
Children's social care is currently a significant cost pressure for the council. The most recent figures, which go up to the end of June, show an expected overspend in the children's services department of over £800,000. The reason for this is cited as costly external children's home places, the rising demand for residential care packages, and increasing complexity and cost of some individual cases.
Director of children's services Audrey Kingham said: "We're ready to go. This is about having a streamlined system with one plan and one voice for our families." She added: "The legislation talks about stable homes built on love. Stability is so important, we can't achieve what we want to without it."
