RCCs in Action: Meeting and exceeding the ambition set out in the Care Review

Following the appointment of Josh MacAlister MP as the new Children's Minister, Luke Bevir, Catriona Moore, and Elizabeth Roe reflect on the work of the Regional Care Cooperative pathfinders and explore what the future could look like.

Following the appointment of Josh MacAlister MP as the new Children’s Minister, there may be a renewed energy across the children’s social care sector to explore the ambition for Regional Care Cooperatives (RCCs) across England. As the author of the 2022 Independent Review of Children’s Social Care (the Care Review), MacAlister laid out bold ambitions for RCCs as part of a wider vision to improve children’s social care planning, commissioning, sufficiency, market oversight, and workforce reform to improve the support available to families and care-experienced young people.

The recent report from the National Audit Office continued to sound the alarm on the cost and quality crisis in children’s residential care. In the Care Review, RCCs were envisioned as a fundamental change to the policy landscape that would give local authorities greater leverage to shape the market and achieve better outcomes for children.

Last year, we supported Greater Manchester and the South East to design and launch England’s first RCCs, based on funding and requirements from the Department for Education.

With the GM RCC launched and the SE RCC soon to be, we have an opportunity to reflect on the original vision for RCCs and the progress made by the Pathfinders. As future RCCs develop, they should be informed by both the ambitions of the Care Review and the successes of the Pathfinders.

The Care Review’s vision for RCCs

The Care Review recommended the creation of RCCs as a radical change to how children’s social care is organised and delivered. It concluded that local authorities, acting individually, were struggling to secure enough high-quality homes for children, and that a new model was needed.

In this vision, RCCs would take responsibility from local authorities for planning, commissioning and delivering fostering, residential, and secure care placements. Local authorities would spend and pool their existing care budgets through their RCC. As a result of this new way of working, the expectation was that RCCs would ensure sufficiency through improved demand forecasting and an improved ability to shape the market and create public or not-for-profit provision where gaps existed.

The Care Review also called for RCCs to stabilise and grow the foster care workforce, improve market oversight and value for money, strengthen quality and consistency, and collaborate closely with health and education partners to better serve children with complex needs.

The ambition was clear: RCCs were to go far beyond existing commissioning partnerships, with the power and resources to transform provision and ensure children grow up in safe, stable and loving homes.

From Ambition to Policy: Stable Homes, Built on Love

The government’s 2023 strategy, ‘Stable Homes, Built on Love’, outlined a more incremental approach to RCCs. Rather than immediately transferring statutory responsibility for children looked after from local authorities, the Department for Education committed to testing the model through a pilot of two pathfinders. This pilot would explore how RCCs could work in practice, build new provision and strengthen commissioning, while leaving local authorities with more day-to-day responsibility compared to the recommendations from the Care Review.

This difference in scope is crucial to bear in mind when comparing the South East and Greater Manchester RCCs with the Care Review’s original ambition.

Where the Pathfinders Are Innovating

Working within this framework and without statutory changes, the two pathfinders have independently set out bold strategies for what their RCCs will achieve.

1. Both RCCs are investing in regional data platforms to forecast demand, track supply of provision, and inform commissioning. These platforms will enable the development of effective real time sufficiency strategies to help local authorities understand where and what types of care are needed and share insights with priority providers.

2. The RCCs are bridging the gap between local authorities and providers to build genuine partnerships. Through acting as an honest broker and providing a unified regional voice, the RCCs are improving transparency, with the aim of creating a more balanced and responsive market that provides value for money. They are also working to bring more capital into the sector through partnerships with ethical social investors.

3. Both RCCs are using DfE capital grants to invest in new regional homes and services tailored to local needs. They are coordinating with partners in health and youth justice to increase provision for children with complex lives including PACE beds, remand beds, and Tier 4 step-down provision.

4. The RCCs understand that improving the regional quality of care must involve a strategy to develop a skilled and sustainable workforce. Without this in place, any attempts at improving service provision will be restricted. Both RCCs are establishing coordinated region-wide strategies to improve recruitment, training, progression, and retention of staff.

5. The RCCs have prioritised the voice of children and young people through the design of their services and inclusion in their governance structures. This is crucial in ensuring that the RCCs’ work is focused on improving the lives of children and young people.

In many of these areas, the RCC pathfinders are progressing beyond the original vision from the Care Review and are developing innovative, creative and deliverable regional solutions to local challenges. They are going beyond regionalised commissioning approaches to address critical issues affecting children’s social care, such as workforce and data processes.

Where RCCs could go further

Any further roll-out of RCCs in England now have dual examples to draw upon: those set out in policy papers and those tested by the two pathfinders. With this in mind, there are several areas where future RCCs could challenge the status quo to an even greater extent.

1. Currently, the RCC pathfinders do not commission services or placements on behalf of local authorities; rather, they are focused on enabling and developing new provision to emerge. To meet the Care Review’s vision of an RCC commissioning at scale on behalf of local authorities, there would need to be changes made to the statutory responsibilities of local authorities and RCCs. It is important that this is developed to reflect existing strengths in commissioning in local authorities, as there is a need to understand what is currently working well and where collective commissioning would have the most impact.

2. The RCCs’ recruitment initiatives are showing signs of positive impacts, but they are limited to the current footprint of the pathfinders and are not yet joined up at the national scale needed for long-term sustainability, particularly for specialist roles. By working at an intra-regional level, the impact of this work will be felt more widely.

3. The RCC pathfinders are working with their fostering hubs, but there is an opportunity for greater integration with other initiatives, including kinship care and family networks as emphasised in the Care Review.

The Care Review said that there should be about 20 RCCs in England. Currently, the two RCC pathfinders operate at different regional sizes compared to each other with differences in their respective footprints. Greater guidance is needed on the most appropriate size for RCCs, and how their boundaries should reflect other regional arrangements, including mayoral combined authorities, Integrated Care Boards, and police forces. It is important that any ramifications of Local Government Reorganisation are considered for this.

What does the future of RCCs look like?

As Josh MacAlister MP steps into the role of Children’s Minister, the sector has a unique opportunity to reflect on what has worked and where current ambitions could be raised.

The journeys of the South East and Greater Manchester RCC pathfinders demonstrate both the promise and the complexity of translating the Care Review’s vision into practice. While both regions have made significant strides, particularly in forecasting, regional governance, and workforce innovation, they have also encountered the limitations of an incremental, pilot-based approach. The pathfinders are already exceeding the Care Review’s ambitions in some areas, such as ethical market shaping and young people’s participation, but there are areas where they could continue to innovate: commissioning on behalf of local authorities and supporting national workforce reform.

Realising the full potential of RCCs will require not just local innovation, but also national policy change and sustained investment, ensuring that the original ambition of the Care Review is not lost, but adapted and strengthened for the future.

For more information on the RCC programme please contact MV Senior Consultant Luke Bevir at luke.bevir@mutualventures.co.uk

Please see this article for more information on what the RCC Pathfinders are aiming to achieve.