Transforming children's services through devo

In this article, Emmet Regan considers what Rewiring the State could mean for children’s services. He argues that real reform must create more joined-up, preventative services built around children, families and place.

There is nothing permanent except change. That is how colleagues working in children's services are feeling right now.

The uncertainty of local government reorganisation continues to cast a shadow over large

swathes of the country, while every local authority is working to implement the Government's ambitious and necessary reforms in areas such as special educational needs and disabilities, the Families First Partnership and the regionalisation of care placements and fostering.

Alongside this crowded landscape, the Government has published its Rewiring the State paper, which is ambitious in both its diagnosis and its prescription. This raises the question of whether Whitehall is speaking with one voice and has a clear sense of direction.

The paper argues that an over-centralised system has become detached from the places it serves and that power, funding and accountability should move from Whitehall to local leaders.

For children's services, this is not a peripheral debate about structures. It goes to the heart of whether we continue to organise services around institutions and departmental boundaries, or around the lives of children and families.

The appropriate level and vehicle for delivering holistic services to children and families remain hotly contested. There is an inherent tension between central government's emphasis on neighbourhood-focused local delivery and the parallel drive towards sub-regional working and alignment within nascent strategic authority boundaries. The forthcoming White Paper needs to be clear about how that tension will be resolved.

The case for change is compelling. A child struggling in school may also be living in insecure accommodation, experiencing poor mental health, caring for a parent or coming into contact with social care. Yet the response is too often divided between organisations with different thresholds, budgets, geographies and accountability arrangements.

Families are repeatedly assessed, professionals spend time negotiating access to support and intervention arrives only when problems have escalated. We have built a system that is often better at processing need than preventing it.

We know doing things differently is possible. In 2012, Leeds City Council launched Child Friendly Leeds as a city-wide approach to making Leeds the best place for children and young people to grow up.

Rather than treating children's services as the responsibility of one department, it mobilised public agencies, schools, businesses and voluntary organisations around a shared ambition. Its 12 ‘wishes', refreshed using the views of 80,000 young people, guide action on mental health, play, poverty, inclusion, travel and youth voice. The model shows how place-based leadership can unite partners around outcomes defined locally by children themselves and how that ambition can be delivered at different scales through different partnerships.

Devolution and children's social care

The wider devolution agenda matters because children's outcomes are shaped by decisions well beyond the statutory children's services department. Housing, transport, skills, employment, public health and economic development all influence family stability and opportunity. Giving strategic authorities greater influence over these levers could allow places to connect social policy and economic policy in a way Whitehall has repeatedly failed to do.

A transport plan should consider whether young people can reach college. A housing strategy should reflect the needs of care leavers and vulnerable families. An employment settlement should include parents who need flexible support to return to work.

Our response to need must be greater than the walls that contain organisations.

But devolution is not automatically the same as impact. Power can be moved from Whitehall to a mayoral office without changing the experience of a child, a family or a frontline practitioner. The test should be whether decisions are made closer to the people affected and whether local leaders have the freedom, resources and accountability to act.

Councils must remain central: they hold statutory responsibilities, democratic relationships and deep knowledge of their communities. Strategic authorities can provide scale and coherence, but they should enable local delivery rather than overshadow it, ensuring that the resulting structures become greater than the sum of their parts.

A different relationship with the centre

A rewired state still needs a strong centre, but a different kind of centre. Central government should set clear national entitlements, safeguard children's rights, maintain transparent standards and intervene where performance fails. It should also provide stable, multi-year funding and comparable data.

This shift will require courage on both sides. Whitehall must let go of control and accept greater local variation. Local leaders must accept sharper accountability for outcomes, rather than simply arguing for more powers. Health bodies, local authorities, schools and the police will need to share authority as well as information.

There is scope to do things differently, but leadership will be essential. The ask of every organisation should be clear: focus on the shared purpose, put place before individual organisational interests and do what is right for children and families.

The promise of Rewiring the State is therefore not simply that decisions will move on a map. It is that the state can behave differently, preventative rather than reactive, joined up rather than fragmented and accountable for people's lives rather than organisational activity. Children's services should be the proving ground.

If devolution can help a child receive the right support earlier, keep a family together safely and open a path to a better future, then rewiring will mean something.

If it only redraws boundaries and creates new governance, we will have changed the circuitry without turning on the light.

If you're interested in the themes in this article and would like to talk, please contact Emmet.Regan@mutualventures.co.uk.

This article was originally published in www.themj.co.uk