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Loading …Staff shortages pose a risk to government plans to bolster the safeguarding of the growing number of children not in school, the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) president has warned.
Andy Smith told MPs this week that several councils had less than one full-time equivalent elective home education worker, meaning the workforce was “significantly insufficient” to take on new responsibilities in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
The bill would require councils to create registers of children not in school, collect information on their education arrangements and support parents of home-schooled children with their education on request.
Parents would need to seek councils’ consent to home educate children subject to a child protection enquiry or plan, while councils would need to review the home and learning environments of home-schooled children subject to such safeguarding measures to determine whether they should be required to attend school.
Growing numbers of home educated children
The measures are designed to improve both the safeguarding and education of home educated children, the number of whom has risen from 116,300 during 2021-22 to 153,300 in 2023-24, according to Department for Education data.
In separate appearances before the education select committee and the committee of MPs scrutinising the bill, Smith said councils’ “hollowed out” elective home education (EHE) workforce would lack the capacity to take on these responsibilities without extra resource.
According to a 2021 ADCS survey of directors, councils’ average spend on EHE services in 2020-21 was £86,211, while they employed an average of 2.2 FTE staff for this purpose.
Lack of staff in local authorities
In his evidence to the public bill committee considering the legislation, Smith said that several councils – including his own authority, Derby – had less than one full-time equivalent staff member working on EHE.
“If you superimpose the changes envisaged by the bill, that provision would be significantly insufficient,” he said.
ADCS president for 2024-25, Andy Smith (picture supplied by ADCS)
“If we think about the practical things around visits, understanding the offer, trying to understand what is happening to children and building up that picture, there would need to be sufficient capacity to get sufficient workers in post across places to do that, and they would need be sufficiently trained.”
The point on training was picked up by Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel chair Annie Hudson, who gave evidence alongside Smith to the education select committee this week, as part of its current inquiry into children’s social care.
‘Need to skill up home education staff on safeguarding’
Hudson said visits to children’s homes to consider whether they should be required to attend school when subject to a child protection enquiry or plan would be carried out by EHE staff, who would “not necessarily have deep safeguarding knowledge and expertise”.
“They should have the foundation knowledge, but we will need to be clear so that those officers undertaking that work know what they might need to look at and look for and families know that
so that it is a transparent relationship when the local authorities execute that duty,” she added.
The government is yet to set out how much funding will be available to implement the legislation, but Local Government Association (LGA) assistant director of policy Ruth Stanier said it was vital all new burdens on councils were suitably resourced. She said the LGA and the DfE were holding talks about this already.
Multi-agency child protection teams
Stanier said the bill’s introduction of multi-agency child protection teams was another area that would require additional resource.
Under the plans, councils, chief officers of police and relevant NHS integrated care boards (ICB) would have to set up one or more multi-agency teams for the relevant local authority area. These would comprise at least one representative from each of the NHS and the police, along with at least two practitioners appointed by the local authority, a social worker and an educational professional.
Under the bill, the teams’ role would be to support the relevant local authority in the exercise of its child protection functions, though it is likely that they would in effect carry out those functions.
The idea, which is being tested in 10 areas under the families first for children pathfinder, was based on a recommendation from the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel in its 2022 report on the murders of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson.
Suggested benefits of joint safeguarding teams
Hudson told the education select committee that, while not a panacea for the challenges facing the child protection system, the introduction of the teams had three potential advantages:
- Making it much easier for professionals from different agencies to share information about children, giving them a “much more real-time picture of what is going on in a child’s life, particularly when there are sudden changes”.
- Pooling the expertise of different professional disciplines and enabling practitioners from different agencies to challenge, as well as support, one another.
- Enabling joint decision making about the child, as opposed to the “siloed decision making” evident in the Arthur and Star cases.
Based on the model being tested in the pathfinder area, the multi-agency teams would include so-called lead child protection practitioners, whose role would be to lead child protection enquiries and hold cases.
Concerns over social worker burnout
While expressing broad support for the teams, Smith reiterated ADCS concerns about social workers holding only child protection cases and not working across a wider spectrum of children’s needs.
“We need to mitigate and minimise issues around burnout and make sure that social workers, through their professional development, have a rounded experience of social work across a broad
array of service users and service types,” he told the education select committee.
The teams are one of a number of measures designed to improve multi-agency safeguarding. These include the introduction of a single unique identifier (SUI) for each child, which professionals should use when sharing information, and a duty to share information for safeguarding and welfare purposes.
‘Risk of increasing volume of information’
Smith was cautious about the potential benefits of the changes, given the barriers to information sharing arising from agencies having separate and unconnected IT systems, distinct recording practices and different cultures.
He said the benefits of information sharing came when practitioners from different agencies came together to “understand what is happening for children…moving beyond single incidents”.
“There is a risk that increasing amounts of unanalysed information that might pass from A to B does not necessarily keep children safe,” he told the select committee.
Citing ADCS research that found councils received 3,001,339 safeguarding concerns in 2023-24, Smith warned: “Starting to add additional information that might come through the single unique identifier could increase that exponentially.”
The DfE plans to pilot the SUI prior to nationwide implementation.
