Social workers echo Munro warnings over children's social care reforms

Most social workers are concerned about current reforms to children’s social care in England or feel they will be actively bad for families, a poll has found.

The results follow warnings from Professor Eileen Munro, who led the coalition government’s 2010-11 review into child protection, that the reforms were "very likely to fail" due to the scale of change and lack of testing.

The reforms to child protection and family support services, through the Families First Partnership (FFP) programme, were tested in 10 areas from 2023-25 before being rolled out across England from April this year.

They involves the creation of multidisciplinary family help teams, designed to help families with multiple and complex needs keep their children with them, and multi-agency child protection teams (MACPTs), with police, health, education and social work representation, to improve safeguarding practice.

Despite these ambitions, a recent Community Care poll, with 554 votes, found most respondents either shares Munro’s concerns or opposed the changes.

Half agreed that, although the changes were right “in principle”, they were being rolled out too quickly and without sufficient testing, while a further 41% felt the reforms would actively harm both families and social work staff.

Only 9% backed the plans, saying they would “improve support for families and make children safer", in line with the Department for Education's intentions.

‘Changes likely to increase risk for children’

Alongside her concerns about the scale of the reforms and lack of testing, Munro also criticised specific elements of the changes, including having non-social work qualified practitioners routinely hold child in need cases.

She questioned how equipped these practitioners would be to identify changes in families’ situations that signalled increased risks to children.

These concerns were echoed by Paul Angeli, who has worked in the sector for 37 years, in comments under the related article.

He said the plans were “well-intentioned” but “likely to increase risk for children”.

“[They] appear to have a limited understanding of the reality of risk management in children’s services,” he added

“Risk arises sometimes suddenly or incrementally over time or catastrophically when circumstances combine. Practitioners need to be forensically oriented and have access to very good supervision to understand such risks.”

'Lack of evidence'

In other comments, Mark and Lorna criticised what they saw as a lack of evidence behind the FFP model.

“Absolutely dreading the changes," said Lorna. "The local authority I work for did something similar before, and it caused a lot of social workers to burn out as the workload was increased hugely.

“Why do we need to keep changing things with no evidence that it works?”

Another practitioner, Anna, pointed to a lack of capacity in schools and the police to play their part in the new approach.

She added: “Excessive rules and high caseloads prevent therapeutic and trustful relationship building with families. They cut the capacity to truly form relationships - which takes time and [differs with] each family - and we lose the potential and wisdom children bring.” 

‘Invest in social workers’

Michael Coleman argued that the government should instead focus on bringing in more skilled social workers and giving them time to build relationships with families.

“Endless changing of systems and innumerable processes achieve nothing when social work caseloads remain so high that it is impossible to work in a meaningful child-focused, trauma-informed way,” he said.

“It’s so disheartening that there is no government-led plan to ensure we have sufficient social workers to protect children.”