The government's children's social care reforms in England are "very likely to fail" due to the scale of change involved and the lack of testing.
That was the damning verdict from Professor Eileen Munro, the social work academic who led the coalition government's 2010-11 review into child protection and is the co-creator of the much-used Signs of Safety model.
In an interview with Community Care, Munro, emeritus professor of social policy at the LSE, raised specific concerns about an overhaul of the child protection conference chair role and an expected increase in the number of non-social work qualified staff taking on child in need cases.
She also criticised what she saw as a lack of focus on social work practice and working conditions from the government in implementing the reforms.
While the Department for Education's (DfE) changes cover all aspects of children's social care, the focus of Munro's criticisms were the reforms spanning early help, child in need and child protection that started in April 2025.
Changes to early help and child protection
Under the so-called Families First Partnership (FFP) programme, councils and their partners are expected to:
- Set up multidisciplinary family help teams to work with families with multiple and complex needs across targeted early help, child in need and child protection levels.
- Appoint family help lead practitioners (FHLPs) from within these teams to do direct work with, and co-ordinate support for, each family, providing a consistent relationship should the family's needs increase or decrease across levels.
- Ensure the FHLP is a social worker when a child is placed on a child protection plan, though in other circumstances they may be non-social workers.
- Create multi-agency child protection teams (MACPTs), with representation from police, health, education and social work practitioners, to carry out councils' child protection responsibilities, working alongside the FHLP.
- Appoint lead child protection practitioners, who must be social workers, from within these teams, to take responsibility for decision making in child protection cases and chair child protection conferences.
- Hold family group decision making (FGDM) meetings, at all stages of families' involvement, to enable extended families to make decisions about the welfare of the child, with a requirement to offer these at the pre-proceedings stage.
The programme is backed by £270m in new funding and £253m in existing resource from the now disbanded Supporting Families scheme per year, from 2025-29, plus a share of an additional £555m from 2025-28. Two elements - the creation of MACPTs and the duty to offer and FGDM meetings at pre-proceedings - due to be enshrined in law through the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
Councils and their partners are expected to have made significant progress towards implementing the model by March 2026.
Reforms 'very likely to fail'
However, Munro warned that reform on this scale created significant risks.
"We have got a very complex child protection system that has evolved over a very long period through trial and error and there are well-established working together cultures and rules for police, education, health and social care," she said. "And so to totally try to change the entire system in one go is, to me, very very likely to fail. It's so unpredictable."
She added: "Changing so much all at once is putting a whole lot of instability into the system and children get harmed when there’s instability.”
The rollout follows less than two years' testing in three authorities (Dorset, Lincolnshire and Worcestershire) and less than one year in a further seven (Lewisham, Luton, Redbridge, Walsall Warrington, Warwickshire and Wirral). Of the ten, three are currently rated outstanding, five are graded good and two requires improvement, by Ofsted.
Changes 'have not been sufficiently tested'
Munro said this level of testing was not sufficient.
"I would like to see it tested in lower-functioning authorities with more workforce problems," she said. "Look at the range of local authorities we have and test more rigorously and for longer."
In terms of specific issues, she raised particular concern about lead child protection practitioners (LCPPs) taking on the role of chairing child protection conferences, which bring together the family, any supporters and advocates they have, and professionals to make decisions about the child's welfare and safety.
Under Working Together to Safeguard Children, the conference chair has the following roles:
- meeting the child and parents in advance to ensure they understand the issues, purpose, process and possible outcomes of the conference;
- considering whether members of the family network should attend and participate in the conference;
- ensuring all participants are encouraged to contribute views independently.
The guidance, which councils must follow other than in exceptional circumstances, says the chair should be a practitioner who is independent of the operational or line management responsibilities of the case, and accountable to the director of children's services.
The guide to FFP programme appears to suggest that it satisfies the requirements of Working Together, stating: "Working Together currently requires child protection conferences to be chaired by a social worker independent from the line management for the lead practitioner. The LCPP role will fulfil this function."
Independent child protection chair role 'being taken out'
However, while family help lead practitioners (FHLPs) will have responsibility for direct child protection practice with families, LCPPs will be responsible for child protection decision making in each case.
Munro said that, in her view, the reforms were "taking out the independent child protection conference chair".
The plan is based on a recommendation to that effect from the 2021-22 Independent Review of Children's Social Care, which argued that LCPPs' "deeper knowledge of the family" would help them in their chairing role, with the change being balanced by providing parents with independent representation at conferences.
However, echoing concerns previously issued by the British Association of Social Workers (BASW), Munro said: "That role was created because it was shown that it led to a more critical review and a better chance of getting close to the truth than when you have a chair who is involved in the case."
“[LCPPs] are the people with the most important information and they should not be focused on chairing a meeting," she added. "You can’t contribute and chair at the same time. As a chair your job should be monitoring the whole thing. I find it really hard that they would decide that.”
Questions over police and health contribution to child protection teams
Though multi-agency child protection teams (MACPTs) will be enshrined in law, with the police and NHS required to provide practitioners for them, Munro questioned whether they would be able to do this.
She said: "They want a health person and a police officer on every child protection team. Is there capacity in the police and health to provide that? And what if there isn't?"
"They should have trialled the approach for longer to check out whether police, education and health really have the capacity and willingness to play such a major part," she added.
Munro also voiced concerns about FHLPs who were not social workers taking on child in need cases.
This has been enabled by a 2023 change to Working Together that removed the requirement for social workers to carry out child in need assessments, which prompted concerns at the time from BASW and Ofsted about the impact on the quality of practice and children's safety.
Under the revised Working Together, all child in need assessments and cases must be overseen by a social work-qualified practice supervisor or manager, who would approve all decisions and may also go on joint visits with the FHLP.
Concerns over non-social work practitioners holding cases
However, Munro raised concerns about how far non-social work qualified FHLPs would be able to identify changes in families' situations that signalled increased risks to children.
"Supervising somebody who isn’t trained in looking for child abuse is quite a piece of work," she said. "You’re rather dependent on what they tell you.
"And if they don’t know what to look for, if they don’t know what’s suspicious – things that, for a social worker, would put a question mark in their head, they may not [tell supervisors what they need to know].”
She said changes in families' situations that increased risks to children were difficult to predict.
"If [parents] take drugs a bit, what happens if they take more? If they come off drugs, will they go back on them? There’s a lot of unpredictability in this work. I think family workers will need good support and a sense of shared decision making around those things."
She said this may require putting in place a dedicated training programme for non-social work qualified FHLP.
'Lack of focus on practice and working conditions'
More generally, she said there was a lack of focus on practice in the guide to the FFP issued by the DfE.
"The whole of the documentation is about process and very little of it is about practice and why it’s difficult," she said.
She also claimed that nothing in the reforms would "improve the working conditions for social workers", which she said was key to enhancing child protection practice.
"[Child protection] used to be the most desirable job in social work and now it has difficulty keeping people," she said. "That’s a change in working conditions, not the work."
Munro called for action to improve the case management systems (CMS) that social workers worked with, which would "release a lot of time", and cut back the volume of guidance and rules governing practice, in an echo of her 2011 government-commissioned report.
Social workers 'inundated with rules'
Though the length of Working Together was cut back radically in response to her 2011 report, it has since grown again, while the DfE has also published separate statutory guidance - the children's social care national framework - setting out expectations of councils in relation to practice and services.
"You are inundating people with guidance and rules, and you are reducing the space for independent, expert thinking and doing, which is where the work gets done," Munro added. "The whole aim of my study was to give more professional space to the social work profession and keep the politicians out of it.”
Munro is the second major social work figure to criticise the DfE's children's social care reforms, following Professor Ray Jones, author of the 2022 Independent Review of Northern Ireland’s Children’s Social Care Services.
In an article for Community Care, published in May 2025, Jones raised concerns about LCPPs being "parachuted in to do section 47 investigations", disrupting existing relationship-based work being carried out by other social workers and taking decisions with insufficient knowledge of the family.
He predicted this would increase the number of child protection enquiries, resulting in children at greatest risk being lost and diverting resource from family support, contrary to the reforms' aims.
