Government and children’s social care – beyond the fragments we need a theory of change
Government is showing a lack of experience with many major decisions. It is observable with children’s social care. This is creating confusion, disbelief, dismay, despair, disengagement amongst service providers, local authority and independent, and the workforce.
It is keenly experienced across the residential child care sector. Government propose reduced use along with reduced income. It is impossible to plan for a future facing such uncertainty.
The previous government allowed unplanned development. The recent past has been one of reaction in a period of uncertainty where family-based care is dwindling. A 44% increase of independent children’s homes in recent years can only be seen as reaction and unplanned.
The cumulative budgetary consequences of the current use of residential options we are only now coming to understand, and the reaction now is to reduce size to reduce budgets. The residential sector is being unappreciated as being vital in this situation. Imagine the situation if this reactive expansion had not occurred? Or if the residential sector was reduced to the numbers outlined in the Care Review?
Children’s care needs planning from a secure base, so whilst we have what we have we need to determine the answers to 2 questions. Is fostering in decline? Recruitment and retention hubs do not seem to be changing the situation. Meanwhile government strategy aims for kinship and other family-based options. Is this sustainable?
But deeper in government thinking there is a ‘basic fault’, there is the need to re-establish trusting secure relationships with children’s social care services. Parto of this is to publicly understand that residential child care and family-based care options meet different needs.
The origins of the need for fostering and residential child care arise in different ways. It is necessary to understand needs arising from poverty, neglect and deprivation, often occurring earlier, open to early intervention and to be family based, and those arising from abuse, trauma, exploitation, often occurring later, requiring therapeutic intervention that can necessitate residence. It is important to understand those later years are not the same children as the early years. Whilst early intervention is desirable it does not necessarily meet the needs of later impingements, which are of a different order.
Moving to look at another piece of the fragments. There seems continuous disruption as an accidental method. Maybe it is making sense within Whitehall? From the outside it is hard to discern the strategy when one arm of government seemingly subverts others.
A good example is the development of regional care coops. Proclaimed as innovative on announcement the reports on work so far are actually much closer to replicating what happens now repackaged with some slight enhancements.
Meanwhile in a forthcoming white paper a proposal will end the two-tier council structure. County and district councils will be asked to submit merger proposals to become unitary with populations of 500k. Mayors will do the coordination ‘shape services to need, serve an area’s economic interests.’ Left hand, right hand, here the parties doing the development of regional care coops will not be those who run them, perhaps new personnel managing reduced budgets with new systems.
Children’s social care requires sophistication not the simplification of the Care Review, increasingly being shown as musings rather than detailed planning. Its New Public Management (NPM) approach does not match to the complexity of the human learning system that is children’s services. NPM goes with the same ideological insistence of fiscal rules, services to fit inadequate budgets.
Across government there is the exhortation of accelerated change with no observable appreciation of the first need being to establish relational holding and containment to promote emotional security.
This achievement of a secure base precedes anything economic. The emphasis on being disruptive inhibits development by letting anxiety flood existing and future systems.
Government media announcements have been looking to managing expectations. Yet Government activity seems propelled by the anxiety driven clash of the electoral rhetoric of change and government encountering the entropy of their actual governmental philosophy, incremental pragmatism. Unresolvable currently this is spooking government. Producing reactive individual announcements is not the same as steady planned radicalism. There must be a theory of change, others might call it project management, others emotional containment.
