Leading with purpose: making sense of change in children’s services

It's a challenging time for Children's Service leaders, with many reforms being introduced. In this article, Jordan Binedell, Principal Consultant, argues that the real challenge is not simply managing each programme in isolation, but creating a clear sense of purpose that helps teams, partners and leaders understand how it all fits together.

Across children’s social care, a significant number of national reforms are being introduced

at pace. These include Families First Partnership programme, SEND reform, Family Hubs, changes to residential care, and in many areas, local government reorganisation. Each brings its own specific funding, terminology, deadlines and accountability. Individually, their intent is clear. Taken together, they create a complex leadership challenge with competing priorities and timelines.

What we hear repeatedly from leaders is not resistance to change, but fatigue across the system. Directors of Children’s Service (DCS’s) describe feeling as though they are constantly firefighting, trying to lead multiple programmes, manage delivery risk, reassure council leaders, and support a stretched workforce, often without a single, unifying story that explains how it all fits together. Understanding the ‘why’ is crucial in bringing people with you on the journey.

Our experience working with local authorities as a national Delivery Partner on a number of reform programmes shows that without that shared narrative outlining what you are trying to achieve, change is experienced as a series of competing initiatives, with the final destination unclear.

From programmes to purpose

The issue is not necessarily the volume of change, but the lack of a clear story about how it fits together. With a shared, locally owned narrative about the wider ambition of children’s services, supported by a small set of guiding principles, individual initiatives can be understood as part of a wider direction.

This overarching narrative helps teams see change as coherent and intentional, connecting different programmes to that shared purpose and showing how they fit together. It provides a way of describing change that is meaningful beyond the boundaries of individual programmes and provides leaders with a basis for decision‑making, allowing individual initiatives to reinforce a shared direction rather than add pressure to already stretched capacity.

Developing this narrative requires leaders to take a step back and understand how different reforms interact across the children’s social care system. This includes being clear about where programmes overlap, where they reinforce each other, and where there are tensions or gaps.

Done well, this creates the conditions for more aligned delivery across the system. It allows leaders to set clearer expectations, hold consistent lines on priorities, and engage partners in more focused conversations about outcomes, contribution and trade-offs.

Making sense of competing demands

Leaders are managing multiple programmes at once, each with its own demands, timelines and expectations. The real challenge lies in deciding how to balance short-term pressures with longer-term improvement, often in the absence of a clear framework for decision-making.

A clear narrative helps with this. It provides a reference point when leaders and their teams are deciding how to respond to competing demands, whether that is managing delivery milestones, supporting workforce capacity, or responding to urgent issues. It makes it easier to identify what needs to be held firmly and where there is scope to adapt.

This is not about trying to do everything. It is about being explicit about priorities, sequencing and intent, and being able to explain those decisions consistently. Without this, change risks becoming reactive, with teams moving between requirements rather than working towards a clear direction.

A call to action for children’s services leaders

In periods of sustained change and pressure, it can be tempting to focus only on delivery and defer longer-term strategic work. In practice, the opposite is true. The more complex the environment, the more important it is to be clear about purpose and direction.

For leaders in children’s services, this means:

·        stepping back from individual programmes to articulate a clear and shared purpose

·        developing a small set of principles to guide decisions across reforms

·        understanding how different programmes fit together from both a workforce and service user perspective

·        using narrative deliberately to explain not just what is changing, but why

In a system under pressure, this is not optional. A shared narrative is what enables leaders to move from reacting to events towards leading purposeful, consistent change.

If you'd like to discuss the themes from this article, please contact Jordan.Binedell@mutualventures.co.uk.