Andy Smith, 2024-25 ADCS President (Photo courtesy of ADCS)
Children's services in England are seeing a decline in the number of secondment social workers as local authorities have made significantly more of them in recent years, an industry leader has said.
Andy Smith, chairman of the Association of Directors of Children's Services, told Community Care he believes the trend is due to rules due to be introduced later this year to curb local authority use of deputy staff.
Regulations on Substitute Social Work
This rule was enacted by the previous administration. A Stable Home Built on Love Part of the child welfare reform strategy aims to improve continuity of support for children and families while reducing the operational costs of child welfare agencies.
These include banning anyone from becoming a temporary employee without three years of full-time experience in child welfare services, requiring municipalities to agree to local price caps on how much they pay agencies, and limiting agencies' use of project teams.
The number of agency social workers has soared in recent years as local governments have increasingly struggled to recruit and retain social workers for child welfare services.
As of September 2023, casual staff made up 17.8% of children's social work workers in local authorities in England, up from 15.5% in 2021.
“The number of agency workers is declining.”
But Smith said there is evidence that this trend is reversing.
“The data certainly shows that the numbers of secondment social workers are moving in the right direction and are falling,” said Mr Smith, Derby City Council's human resources services strategy director.
“Certainly in my own region, the East Midlands, we are seeing that in all 10 local authorities. So our hypothesis is that the impact of the reforms that are obviously coming into force towards the autumn are starting to have an effect in the right direction.”
Under the previous administration's plan, statutory guidelines requiring local governments to follow most of the rules would come into effect this summer, with price caps and data-collection requirements to come into effect in the fall.
The New Labour government is yet to comment publicly on the plans but Mr Smith, speaking at the ADCS conference last week, said he expected the statutory guidelines to come into force in September.
Disappointed by project team's reversal
The ADCS has been strongly campaigning for a rein in the agency social work market since 2021, and Mr Smith said the DfE’s proposals “largely reflect” the association’s thinking.
But he added that he remained disappointed with the previous administration's decision to reverse an earlier plan to ban the use of project teams altogether.
These include local governments hiring large numbers of temporary workers, often with their own management structures and caseload limits.
ADCS has long warned that government agencies are increasingly restricting the supply of substitute doctors to project teams, preventing local authorities from hiring individual workers to fill shortfalls and resulting in higher charges per doctor.
The number of social workers employed through Teams increased five-fold between January to June 2021 and the same period in 2022, according to the ADCS survey.
New administration gives ban a “chance” to be reinstated
But the department backed away from the idea of ​​a total ban after some respondents to the initial consultation on the rules said their use would be appropriate where caseloads or staff vacancies or vacancies are high, or to help struggling authorities.
Smith said ADCS was disappointed with the “change in policy”, but added that the new government created an opportunity to reinstate the planned ban.
“When I meet with the Minister for the first time, he will be discussing an overview on child welfare,” he said.
“They could do it tomorrow. It's really easy to do and I think it would send a really strong message to the industry that the government is listening and understands the value of human connection and relationship-based social work. Social work is not a project.”
Child Welfare Reform Plan
Speaking at the ADCS conference, Mr Smith emphasised the urgency of implementing sector reforms recommended in the Independent Review of Child Welfare and implemented in 2010. A stable home built on love.
In addition to the institutions' social work regulations, these are designed to ensure that more children are supported to remain with their families, or where this is not possible, with kinship carers, that children at risk are much better protected than at present, and that children who enter care have a much better experience than at present and therefore better life chances.
The Care Review predicts that reforms would cost ÂŁ2.6 billion over four years, but would save money in the long term by reducing the number of people in care by 30,000 (around 30%) within 10 years.
So far the DfE has committed ÂŁ200m to testing the proposed changes through 10 “pioneer” areas which are trialling the deployment of family support teams, integrating children in need with targeted early support services and deploying specialist child protection workers.
Reforms will cost 'more than the ÂŁ2.6bn proposed in the care review'
“We simply cannot afford to let our plans falter or really take our foot off the gas, both in terms of outcomes for our kids and in terms of the finances that we work so hard to balance every day,” Smith said in his speech.
“The longer we leave it, the more it will cost. We need to reset the system now.”
Mr Smith told Community Care that more than ÂŁ2.6 billion is now needed because service costs have increased since the final report of the care review in May 2022.
He said he raised the issue in his first phone call with new Education Minister Bridget Phillipson last week.
Mr Smith also called on the Government to broaden the focus of child welfare reform beyond local authorities to key partners.
“If it's only seen as a local government effort then it will not realise its ambitions and will not really improve outcomes for children,” he said. “It needs to involve health and police strategically and on the ground and that was totally lacking in the run-up to the general election.”
Funding services requires 'really tough choices'
Labour made no funding commitments for children's care during the election, despite the Local Government Association saying that local authorities will need an extra ÂŁ5 billion in 2026-27 compared to 2023-24 to maintain current levels of children's care.
At the same time, the new government promised not to raise income tax rates, national insurance contributions, value-added tax or corporation tax, and imposed strict fiscal rules on itself limiting the amount of borrowing it could do to fund public spending.
Funding for local authorities beyond 2025 will be revealed in this autumn's spending review, and Mr Smith stressed “really tough choices” will have to be made, which could include using existing resources in a different way.
Call for joint funding for children with mental illness
For example, he proposed combining NHS and local authority resources to support children with significant mental health needs, similar to the Better Care Fund (BCF) in adult services.
The BCF brings together local authority and NHS funding locally to help people live independently at home for longer and receive care where it is most appropriate, including addressing delayed discharges from hospital, freeing up money that was previously an NHS resource for adult social care services.
Local authorities are struggling to find suitable placements in care for children with severe mental health needs, which has led them to seek numerous so-called deprivation of liberty (DoL) orders from the High Court to authorise highly restrictive care arrangements in often unregistered care facilities.
At the same time, some local government mayors have criticised the NHS for cutting support for these young people through child and adolescent mental health services.
Smith said BCF-style arrangements could encourage investment in preventive services and help local governments avoid the need to procure expensive and restrictive placements through Ministry of Labour mandates.