Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill: New duties in Family Group Decision Making and kinship care
The ‘Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill’ contains many of the measures set out in the ‘Keeping Children Safe: Helping Families Thrive’ policy statement. The statement outlines a commitment to support children to live in family settings where children cannot remain at home, including through kinship or foster care, rather than residential care. Alongside this, the statement sets out ambitions to fix the broken care market, and ensure the system is working effectively for vulnerable children and families.
Part one of the Bill focuses on placing statutory responsibilities on local authorities to provide Family Group Decision Making(FGDM) before initiating care proceedings as well as seeking to regulate use of agency workers within local authorities.
Part two sets out to strengthen the role of education partners in safeguarding children, whilst also seeking to enhance multi-agency safeguarding practice through the creation of multi-agency safeguarding teams, combining police, health and local authorities. Part two also places additional responsibilities on education providers to fulfil safeguarding and wellbeing obligations to children and young people. This includes providing additional services such as mandatory breakfast clubs and implementing tighter structures to engage and monitor children missing from education.
We have identified the key measures in the Bill that impact children’s social care:
Family Group Decision Making
- Mandates local authorities to offer family group decision-making meetings before applying to take a child into care, promoting family involvement in care decisions.
Child protection and safeguarding
- Includes education and childcare providers in local safeguarding arrangements.
- Establishes multi-agency child protection teams comprising professionals from education, social work, health, and police sectors.
- Introduces a single unique identifier for children to improve data sharing among agencies.
Support for children in care, leaving care, or in kinship care
- Defines kinship carers in law and requires local authorities to publish a "kinship local offer" detailing available services.
- Extends the role of Virtual School Heads to support children in need and those in kinship care.
- Mandates local authorities to offer "Staying Close" support to care leavers and provide information on transitioning to independent living.
Accommodation of children
- Allows the Secretary of State to direct local authorities to establish regional cooperation arrangements for planning and commissioning homes for looked-after children.
- Provides a statutory framework for depriving children of their liberty in specific accommodations.
Regulation of children's homes and fostering agencies
- Enhances Ofsted's oversight of organisations operating multiple children's homes or independent fostering agencies.
- Introduces financial oversight measures and allows the Secretary of State to cap profits of providers.
Care workers
- Empowers the Secretary of State to regulate the use of agency workers in children's social care.
- Extends legislation against ill-treatment or wilful neglect to children aged 16 and 17 in certain care and detention settings.
The Bill is currently under consideration in Parliament and is at the point of a second reading in the House of Lords. Track the progress of the Bill here.
Areas of particular relevance to CoramBAAF local authority (LA) members include the new duty in relation to Family Group Decision Makingand the requirement for local authorities to publish a local offer in relation to kinship care. We will be following these developments closely and supporting members in relation to these new duties.
A move to greater regionalisation is central to both ‘Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive’ and the Bill. The bill specifically allows the establishment of regional cooperation arrangements across local authorities, with the intention of enabling groups of LAs to gain economies of scale, harnessing their collective buying power. The intention is also to facilitate greater collaboration with relevant partners (including health and justice) to improve services for children in care. Alongside this, the government will make sure every local authority has the offer of a regional fostering recruitment hub. This aims to help raise awareness about fostering and offer prospective carers support from the start of their fostering journey in addition to improving the support offer for existing foster carers.