| Engaging with Evidence | Preventative Spending in Children’s Social Care – Lessons from Norfolk’s 100,000 Care Days Avoided

For the sixteenth session of Engaging with Evidence, we explored preventative spending in children's social care.

Helping families in difficulty before they reach full-blown crisis is good for children's outcomes and good for the public purse. But the system of prevention is not working well enough, and more and more children are going into care.

This is one of the main findings of the MacAlister Care Review. The review recommends an investment of £2 billion for "family help", which would combine existing early help provision with statutory "Child in Need" services. Families would build a more consistent relationship with care agencies over time, with a focus on support rather than assessment. Future demand for more intensive forms of care could be drastically reduced. The government's response commits to some of these recommendations, but two questions remain:

1. How should a locally-based wrap-around family help offer, however it was funded, be implemented?
2. Without new central government funding, where else could the money come from? Is there a way to unlock the required upfront investment locally, reducing future demand on care placements?

The session was chaired by Nigel Ball, Executive Director at the GO Lab. To begin the discussion, we heard from the Stronger Families Norfolk Social Impact Bond (SIB), a project commissioned under UK’s Life Chances Fund. The programme, set up in 2019, uses Functional Family Therapy for Child Welfare to improve communication and supportiveness between and young people and their parents. We delved into the uniqueness of the project’s intervention for supporting families to stay together for more than 100,000 days so far, and explored the lessons coming out of the project and how these might be applied to children's commissioning elsewhere in the country. The focus on outcomes instead of inputs, the flexibility in delivery, and the relational elements of the partnership are likely to be key areas of focus for the discussion.