60,000 re-referrals a year shows children's services must focus more on early help, says report

Published by Professional Social Work magazine, 3 March 2022

A quarter of children denied help after an initial assessment because they don't meet the threshold for support end up being re-referred within a year, new research has found.

The findings, by Action for Children, give fresh impetus to calls for a reconfiguring of children’s services to focus more on early help rather than crisis interventions.

The charity’s report Too little, too late, found 85 per cent of assessments that did not meet the Section 17 threshold for social care were closed without being referred to early help, equal to 1.26 million cases in the five years up to 2020.

Of these, 25 per cent ended up being re-referred within 12 months, equal to 320,000 or an average of 64,000 a year.

The report says these “missed opportunities” for early help are leading to “pressures building up later in the system”.

“This results in more costly, intensive interventions and unnecessary harm for children and families. The secondary effect is of trapping children’s services in a cycle of late intervention which swallows budgets and squeezes out financial support to further expand early help.”

The report adds: “The overall picture it presents is that early help is still not the primary tool we have for meeting demand for children’s services. A reimagining of social care would see most people that interact with children’s services doing so through the preventative services of early help, which is designed specifically to manage needs before they escalate.”

The charity blamed cuts that have “ravaged” budgets in children’s services and the “soaring costs” of residential care placements for local authorities too often putting early help “first on the chopping block”.

Its report highlights figures that show spending on early intervention in English local authorities fell from £3.6 billion in 2010 to £1.8 billion in 2020. Meanwhile, spending on late intervention rose from £5.6 billion to £7.6 billion during the period.

Early intervention spending made up only 19 per cent of children’s services budgets by 2020 compared to 39 per cent in 2010.

Matt Dunkley, of the Association of Directors of Children's Services, said: "There is no doubt that the earlier we work with children and families to help them overcome the issues they face, the less impact these challenges will have on their lives but also on society as a whole. The problem is there is currently not enough funding in the system to enable this approach in all local authorities."

Action for Children is calling for there to be a legal duty on local authorities to provide early help and government funding to be increased by £1.93 billion a year.

The report’s findings are based on Freedom of Information requests for the five years between 2015 and 2020, with full data provided by 59 local authorities.

It found wide regional variations in the amount of early help, with some authorities providing for more than ten per cent of children and others only two per cent.

The report findings chime with those in a recent study co-produced with parents that called for “more human, focused and supportive practice” in social work.

Called Children’s Social Care – the Way Forward produced by the Parents, Families and Allies Network, it said social work had become “engulfed in child protection investigations” with assessments focused on harm rather than identifying needs.

England’s Independent Review into Children’s Social Care also identifies a need for early support In its interim report The Case for Change.

It says families struggling in adversity too often come up against and “adversarial” system increasingly focused on assessment and investigations rather than help.

The report calls for a new definition of “family help” as “high quality, evidence-led” support delivered by skilled and trusted professionals providing support to keep families together.

In the autumn budget Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced £82 million for 75 new family hubs, the government's strategy for transforming early support within communities, as part of £500 million for children and family services over the next three years.

However, Action for Children says: "This equates to less than a tenth ofthe cuts to early intervention spending in the last decade."