MacAlister Review
Independent Review of Children's Social Care
Education
Independent review of children's social care in England. Found the system was reactive and bureaucratic, failing to provide the loving and stable relationships children need.
80recommendations
80Not Yet Responded
Government Response
Government published "Stable Homes, Built on Love" strategy February 2023 accepting many but not all recommendations. Implementation criticised as underfunded at £200m against estimated £2.6bn need.
2 February 2023
Recommendations
Recommendation 1
A new umbrella of "Family Help" should combine work currently done at targeted early help and section 17, ending handovers and bringing the flexible, non-stigmatising approach at early help to a wider group of families.
Recommendation 10
All cases of significant harm should be co-worked by an Expert Child Protection Practitioner who is responsible for making key decisions (in the future this would be someone who has completed our proposed Early Career Framework).
Recommendation 11
Working Together should set expectations on multi-agency capabilities for child protection and the National Children’s Social Care Framework should set out effective practice models for joint working.
Recommendation 12
Investment in Family Help will provide resources for multidisciplinary responses to extra familial harms.
Recommendation 13
Government should amend Working Together to introduce a Child Community Safety Plan to clarify where primary harm is not attributable to families, supported by practice guides and the Early Career Framework.
Recommendation 14
There should be clearer expectations about partnership responses to extra familial harms across an area and this should be a priority area for learning.
Recommendation 15
Government should integrate funding aimed at preventing individual harms into a single local response to extra familial harms, including enabling areas to integrate their Violence Reduction Unit funding and infrastructure into their local response to extra familial harms.
Recommendation 16
Subject to a positive evaluation of the pilot to devolve responsibility for the National Referral Mechanism decisions for child victims to local areas, government should roll this out to all areas.
Recommendation 17
Government should implement the recommendations of the Taylor Review to simplify the experiences of children in the youth justice system, and as a first step, should roll out the flexibility to all local authorities to integrate AssetPlus Assessments with children in need assessments.
Recommendation 18
Guidance and legislation on information sharing should be strengthened and local safeguarding partners should confirm they have information sharing agreements in place and have audited practice in this area.
Recommendation 19
Government should set a target to achieve frictionless sharing of information between local authority and partner systems and between different local authorities by 2027. To enable this they must take an imminent decision on whether to adopt the NHS number as a consistent identifier alongside work by the National Data and Technology Taskforce discussed in Chapter Eight.
Recommendation 2
Eligibility for Family Help should be set out in a sufficient level of detail nationally to give a more consistent understanding of who should receive Family Help, whilst giving enough flexibility to enable professional judgement and empower Family Help Teams to respond flexibly to families' needs.
Recommendation 20
The National Children’s Social Care Framework practice guides should promote effective practice for engaging families. Parental representation should be offered to all families in child protection.
Recommendation 21
Improve the quality and consistency of local and judicial decision making through improving the quality and transparency of data and facilitating learning at a local level.
Recommendation 22
The Public Law Working Group should lead work to bring learning from the Family Drug and Alcohol Courts and other problem solving approaches into public law proceedings, to make proceedings less adversarial and improve parents’ engagement in the process.
Recommendation 23
Government should introduce legislation which makes the use of family group decision making mandatory before a family reaches Public Law Outline. The features and delivery practice of effective family group decision making should also be included in the National Children’s Social Care Framework.
Recommendation 24
A Family Network Plan should be introduced and enabled in law to support and give oversight to family-led alternatives to care.
Recommendation 25
All local authorities should make a financial allowance paid at the same rate as their fostering allowance available for special guardians and kinship carers with a Child Arrangement Order looking after children who would otherwise be in care.
Recommendation 26
Legal aid should be provided in a range of circumstances where special guardians and kinship carers with a Child Arrangement Order interact with the family courts.
Recommendation 27
All new special guardians and kinship carers with a Child Arrangement Order (CAO) should be given kinship leave, which matches the entitlement given to adopters.
Recommendation 28
As part of our recommendation to establish a National Children’s Social Care Framework in Chapter Eight, local authorities should develop peer support and training for all kinship carers.
Recommendation 29
Government should develop a new legal definition of kinship care, taking a broad range of circumstances into account.
Recommendation 3
Local Family Help Teams should be designed in a way that enables families and practitioners to have a conversation about their concerns rather than relying on mechanical referrals. If families are not eligible for Family Help, support should be available in universal and community services and the front door to Family Help should be equipped to link families to this support.
Recommendation 30
Contact arrangements between birth parents, adopted children and adoptive parents should be assumed by default and modernised through the swift roll out of technology enabled methods of contact, such as Letterswap.
Recommendation 31
New and ambitious care standards, applicable across all homes for children, should be introduced.
Recommendation 32
Regional Care Cooperatives should be established to plan, run and commission residential care, fostering, and secure care.
Recommendation 33
A windfall tax on profits made by the largest private children’s home providers and independent fostering agencies should be levied to contribute to the costs of transforming the care system.
Recommendation 34
Linked to our recommendations in Chapter Seven, Ofsted should be given new powers to oversee and intervene in the children’s social care market.
Recommendation 35
The Department for Education should launch a high profile national foster carer recruitment programme to recruit 9,000 additional foster carers.
Recommendation 36
Local authorities, and eventually Regional Care Cooperatives, should use family group decision making to identify important adults that are already known to a child and may be willing to foster.
Recommendation 37
Foster carers should be given delegated authority by default, to take decisions which affect the day to day lives of children in their care.
Recommendation 38
All foster carers should be able to access high quality training and peer support. As part of the National Children’s Social Care Framework, all local authorities should develop a model of foster carer support based on the principles of Mockingbird.
Recommendation 39
Independent, opt-out, high quality advocacy for children in care and in proceedings should replace the existing Independent Reviewing Officer and Regulation 44 Visitor roles. The Children’s Commissioner for England should oversee these advocacy services, with the powers to refer children’s complaints and concerns to the court.
Recommendation 4
Family Help should be delivered by multidisciplinary teams, embedded in neighbourhoods, harnessing the power of community assets and tailored to local needs.
Recommendation 40
New legislation should be passed which broadens corporate parenting responsibilities across a wider set of public bodies and organisations.
Recommendation 41
Government should make care experience a protected characteristic, following consultation with care experienced people and the Devolved Administrations.
Recommendation 42
National government should issue statutory guidance to local authorities setting out the priority that should be afforded to care experienced adults in accessing local services such as social housing.
Recommendation 43
Local authorities should redesign their existing Independent Visitors scheme for children in care and care leavers to allow for long term relationships to be built.
Recommendation 44
As part of the National Children’s Social Care Framework, all local authorities should have skilled family finding support equivalent to, or exceeding, the work of Lifelong Links in place by 2024 at the very latest.
Recommendation 45
A new lifelong guardianship order should be created, allowing a care experienced person and an adult who loves them to form a lifelong legal bond.
Recommendation 46
As part of our recommendations about Ofsted inspection (Chapter Eight), Virtual School Heads should be held accountable for the education attainment of children in care and care leavers up to age 25 through Ofsted’s ILACS framework. Pupil Premium funding should be focused on evidence led tutoring and mentoring programmes.
Recommendation 47
Virtual School Heads should work to identify more children in care who might benefit from a place at a state or independent day or boarding school, and the Department for Education should create a new wave of state boarding capacity led by the best existing schools.
Recommendation 48
Introduce a new kitemark scheme for higher education to drive improvements in admissions, access and support for those with care experience.
Recommendation 49
The Care Leaver Covenant should be refreshed to align with the five missions set out in this report and co-produced with care experienced people. Employers should be able to apply for a new government led accreditation scheme which recognises their commitment to supporting care leavers into well paid jobs.
Recommendation 5
Government should make an investment of roughly £2 billion in supporting local authorities, alongside their partners, to implement the proposed transformation in Family Help. National government pots of funding should be mainstreamed into this funding stream and local partners should be incentivised to contribute. Once transformation is complete, the government should ring-fence funding for Family Help to ensure rebalanced investment is sustained.
Recommendation 50
An annual care leaver bursary should be made available to all apprentices up to the age of 25, and employers should be allowed to use unspent apprenticeship levy funds to tailor support for those with care experience.
Recommendation 51
There should be a range of housing options open to young people transitioning out of care or who need to return, such as Staying Put, Staying Close and supported lodgings. Staying Put and Staying Close should be a legal entitlement and extended to age 23 with an ‘opt-out’ rather than ‘opt-in’ expectation.
Recommendation 52
Introduce a stronger safety net against care leaver homelessness by removing the local area connection test, ending intentionally homelessness practice, providing a rent guarantor scheme and increasing the leaving care grant to £2,438 for care experienced people.
Recommendation 53
The identification and response to poor mental health issues should be a core part of training programmes for any professionals working with children and young people that have involvement with children’s services.
Recommendation 54
All local authorities must improve care leaver mental and physical health support, and the National Children’s Social Care Framework should promote the most effective multidisciplinary models of doing this.
Recommendation 55
Integrated Care Boards should publish their plans for improving the mental and physical health of those in care and leaving care and routinely publish progress. As part of these plans and new corporate parenting responsibilities, the Department of Health and Social Care and the NHS should exempt care leavers from prescription charges up to age 25.
Recommendation 56
As part of recommendation in Chapter Eight (improving data collection), the Office for National Statistics should collect and report data on the mortality rate of care leavers and care leaver health outcomes. Government should also launch a new cohort study which tracks the health outcomes of care experienced people and helps to gather other missing data on housing, education and employment outcomes.
Recommendation 57
A nationally led programme should get social workers back to practice through: action on technology to reduce time spent case recording; a mechanism for challenging unnecessary workload drivers; requiring all registered social workers to spend time in practice; and trialling flexible working models around the lives of children and families.
Recommendation 58
Introduce a five year Early Career Framework for social workers, an Expert Practitioner role and national pay scales.
Recommendation 59
The government should introduce new national rules on agency usage supported by the development of not-for-profit regional staff banks to reduce costs and increase the stability and quality of relationships children and families receive.
Recommendation 6
As part of the National Children’s Social Care Framework, the government should define outcomes, objectives, indicators of success and the most effective models for delivering help. Funding should be conditional on meeting the goals of the Framework.
Recommendation 60
To support the development of the wider social care workforce, government should produce a Knowledge and Skills Statement for family support workers; appoint Social Work England to set standards and regulate residential children’s home managers; and fund a new leadership programme that could train up to 700 new managers in the next five years.
Recommendation 61
The Department for Education should strengthen existing leadership programmes to better align them with the review’s reforms and increase the diversity of leadership.
Recommendation 62
A National Children’s Social Care Framework should set the objectives and outcomes for children’s social care.
Recommendation 63
The National Children’s Social Care Framework should include a balanced scorecard of indicators to support learning and improvement. To support this there should be an overhaul of what data is collected and how those collections work, so that we have more meaningful metrics and more regular data to help drive transparency and learning in the system.
Recommendation 64
The National Children’s Social Care Framework should include practice guides, setting out the best evidenced approaches to achieving the objectives set out in the Framework.
Recommendation 65
Data and feedback should be used to prompt local and national learning to continually improve services. At a national level this should be via a National Practice Group and a National Reform Board. The evidence and learning landscape should be strengthened through the integration of overlapping What Works Centres, starting with the integration of the Early Intervention Foundation and What Works for Children’s Social Care.
Recommendation 66
The National Reform Board should establish a mechanism for local authorities to raise where they feel there are national regulatory blockers to taking a course of action that is in the best interests of children and families, with action taken to address this.
Recommendation 67
The responsibilities of multi-agency safeguarding arrangements should be amended to emphasise their role as a strategic forum focused on safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children, with attendance reflecting this.
Recommendation 68
Working Together should be amended to set out clear joint and equal operational responsibilities for partners. The Director of Children’s Services should be the primary interface between strategic and operational leaders to facilitate effective multi-agency working.
Recommendation 69
The role of the Director of Children’s Service should be reviewed to give clarity to the role following this review, the SEND and AP Green Paper, and the Schools White Paper, to reflect their role as a champion for children and families within their area. The individual contributions of partners to achieving the review’s vision should be set out clearly in Working Together and reflected in each organisations’ strategic plans.
Recommendation 7
Alongside recommendations to strengthen multi-agency partnerships and the role of the Director of Children’s Services, government should consider legislating to put the existence of multidisciplinary Family Help Teams on a statutory footing.
Recommendation 70
Partnerships should become more transparent, including publishing minutes of partnership meetings and the financial contributions of each partner. The Safeguarding Children Reform Implementation Board should be reviewed and strengthened to take a greater leadership role in safeguarding arrangements, including requesting and publishing critical information about partnerships.
Recommendation 71
The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel and relevant What Works Centres should take a more hands on role in promoting evidence and supporting partnerships to improve.
Recommendation 72
Each agency inspectorate should review their framework to ensure there is sufficient focus on individual agency contributions to joint working. Where there are concerns about the functioning of partnerships, joint inspections, with a judgement attached, should be triggered.
Recommendation 73
Schools should be made a statutory safeguarding partner and contribute to the strategic and operational delivery of multi-agency working.
Recommendation 74
Government should incentivise greater partner contributions through requiring partners to publish their financial contribution and making receiving the full funding for reform contingent on partner contributions.
Recommendation 75
National government should ensure it has an oversight mechanism in place to ensure policy relating to children and families is aligned in contact with children’s social care. Government programmes should be streamlined to support these reforms and youth justice policy should move to the Department for Education.
Recommendation 76
Government should introduce an updated funding formula for children’s services, and take greater care to ensure that changes in government policy that impact the cost of delivering children’s social care are accompanied by additional resources for local government.
Recommendation 77
Ofsted inspection should be reformed to increase transparency in how judgements are made, ensure inspection applies a rounded understanding of being ‘child focused’ and to ensure inspection supports the proposed reforms.
Recommendation 78
Strengthen intervention powers and introduce Regional Improvement Commissioners to provide more robust challenge in the system. Ensure there is a clear expert improvement offer for local authorities.
Recommendation 79
Government should establish a National Data and Technology Taskforce to drive progress on implementing the review’s three priority recommendations to achieve frictionless data sharing by 2027, drastically reduce the time social workers spend on case recording and improve the use and collection of data locally.
Recommendation 8
Ofsted inspections should reinforce a focus on families receiving high quality, evidence based help that enables children to thrive and stay safely at home.
Recommendation 80
The Department for Education should have a proactive strategy on making better use of data in children’s social care, including a strategy for data linking for children’s social care with other data sources that makes use of the ONS integrated data service.
Recommendation 9
Government should ensure alignment in how the proposals in the SEND and Alternative Provision Green Paper and this review are implemented. The government should ask the Law Commission to review the current patchwork of legislation that exists to support disabled children and their families.