Category: Community Care – Children
Monday It’s my third week back in a practice job after six years away as a social work lecturer. My new role is in mental health but I’m working alongside a lot of local authority social workers. I’m shadowing a meeting about a young person in care. The social worker has been working with this […]
The care review will focus on ensuring love, stability and safety for children, whether in their families or in care, chair Josh MacAlister has said as it started work yesterday. An early plan for the review said it would deliver early conclusions by the summer and would focus on tackling racial disparities in care and […]
Story updated 2 March 2021 The average number of cases held by children’s social workers in English councils has fallen for the third consecutive year, according to Department for Education figures. Frontline practitioners practitioners were responsible for 16.3 cases as of September 2020, down from 16.9 in 2019, 17.4 in 2018 and 17.8 in 2017, […]
“Short-termist” government funding for children’s services is “destabilising” councils’ ability to plan and sustain services in the medium to long-term. That was the warning from the Association of Directors of Children’s Services in its seventh Safeguarding Pressures report, the ADCS’s series of studies of the demands on councils in relation to children’s social care, early help and […]
The Department for Education’s (DfE) decision to ban unregulated accommodation for under-16s from September 2021 will leave many teenagers at risk in unsuitable placements, sector bodies have warned. The Children’s Commissioner for England and the British Association of Social Workers England were among organisations to say the DfE should have extended the ban to under-18s, […]
People with experience of the social care system were caused “pain, anger and disbelief” after over 900 had their applications for involvement in a group advising the care review rejected. From over 1,000 applications to join the experts by experience group, only 40 were invited for interview by review chair Josh MacAlister, of whom 10-15 […]
A council wrongly made a man feel he had to leave his family home by not making clear that a safety plan was voluntary, causing him distress and uncertainty, the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman has found. The watchdog is using the case to remind councils that they cannot require parents to leave their home […]
Medway council is no longer at risk of losing its children’s services after its commissioner found the authority had the “capacity and capability to deliver the changes needed”. The Department for Education-appointed commissioner, Eleanor Brazil, had been in place to oversee improvements at Medway since September 2019 following an ‘inadequate’ judgment by Ofsted, which had found […]