Councils and partner agencies are to be required to establish multi-agency child protection teams, under legislation to overhaul children's social care.
The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill would also allow for the regulation of agency work in children's social care and the creation of a new type of placement in which a child could be deprived of liberty.
Other planned reforms include requiring authorities to offer families a family group decision making meeting before making a care or supervision order application, to enable the network around the child to discuss and make proposals regarding their welfare.
Multi-agency child protection teams
The creation of multi-agency child protection teams was a recommendation from the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s 2022 report into the murders of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson.
That review found a “systemic flaw in the quality of multi-agency working”, with “an overreliance on single agency processes with superficial joint working and joint decision making”.
On the back of this report, and that of the Independent Review of Children's Social Care, the previous government selected 10 areas to test the value of multi-agency child protection teams, alongside other measures, under the families first for children pathfinder. The measure in the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill will be part of a national rollout of the pathfinder.
Under the bill, councils, chief officers of police and relevant NHS integrated care boards (ICB) must set up one or more multi-agency child protection teams for the relevant local authority area.
The teams' composition and role
Each team would consist of at least one social worker and educational professional, put forward by the relevant director of children's services, a health professional nominated by the relevant ICB and a police officer chosen by the chief of police.
The government will specify requirements for these roles, for example in relation to qualifications and experience, in regulations under the legislation. This is likely to include requirements for lead child protection practitioners, the specialist social workers who form part of the multi-agency teams being tested through the pathfinder.
The legislation states that the teams' role would include supporting councils in carrying out their duty to investigate child protection concerns, under section 47 of the Children Act 1989, along with other duties prescribed in regulations.
However, based on the pathfinder, it is likely that the role of the multi-agency teams will be to carry out section 47 investigations and other core child protection functions.
What else is in the bill?
Other measures in the bill include:
- Enabling the government to regulate councils' use of agency workers in children's social care, which would cover both social worker and non-social worker roles. This would be based on rules brought into force in October 2024, which only cover social workers.
- Mandating councils to offer a ‘family group decision making’ meeting when they are seriously considering applying for a care or supervision order, to give families an opportunity to come together and make a proposal in response to concerns regarding the child’s welfare.
- Providing a statutory framework to authorise a deprivation of liberty for children who need it to keep them safe, in accommodation other than a secure children’s home, designed with the primary purpose of care and treatment.
- Enabling the government to require councils to join together regionally to carry out their functions for accommodating looked-after children. Such regional care co-operatives are currently being tested in two areas.
- Empowering Ofsted to subject parent companies to an improvement plan if any of their subsidiaries are suspected of failing to meet the required standards in two or more regulated services that they run, such as children's homes.
- Enabling Ofsted to impose fines on companies for breaches of care standards, including for running unregistered children's homes.
- Setting up a financial oversight regime, run by the DfE, for the largest and most significant providers of children's social care services, which would require them to provide information to the DfE on their finances, including in relation to their sustainability.
- Giving the government the power, through regulations, to cap the profits of non-local authority providers of children's homes or fostering agencies.
- Requiring local authorities to publish a local offer setting out their support for kinship families.
- Requiring councils to provide to eligible care leavers up to the age of 25 with support with finding and maintaining accommodation and accessing services where their welfare requires it
- Automatically including education and childcare agencies in multi-agency safeguarding arrangements.
- Making provision for the specification of a single unique identifier for each child, to aid information sharing between agencies.
- Extending the role of virtual school heads to promoting the educational achievement of children in need and children in kinship care on a statutory basis.
- Requiring councils to have and maintain children not in school registers and provide support to home-educating parents.
- Empowering local authorities to require that children subject to child protection processes attend school when school is in their best interests.
