Home improvements

It is proving to be a frantic year for children’s homes. The government’s response to high-profile cases of sexual exploitation of children in residential care has already seen new regulations, and further reforms will be filtering through before 2014 is out.

A number of changes are already in place, including annual risk assessments of the local area in which a home is located and new minimum qualifications for staff. The government is also introducing rules requiring homes to inform councils when children move in and out of the area, and checks to stop new homes opening in “unsafe” areas. An overhaul of workforce development is also planned.

Although the reforms are brand new, the Independent Children’s Homes Association (ICHA) believes they are already delivering improvements, even if implementation is proving far from easy.

“What’s been noticeable and notable is the amount of activity within the residential sector as people get to grips with things,” says Jonathan Stanley, chief executive of ICHA. “The way the sector is engaging with it is improving practice. But that is taking a great deal of input – the amount of development work and changes to practice wasn’t appreciated. The easy work was done through the expert groups and the setting of regulations. The implementation itself is challenging.”

One example is the need for homes to conduct annual risk assessments and devise convincing plans for protecting children from those risks.

“With the location assessment, we’re looking at children’s homes working intensively with 12 to 15 local agencies,” says Stanley. “All of this is good. But it means a remodelling of children’s services and a remodelling of all those other agencies, so there’s a burden on them as well. We are one month into something, the profound implications about which it is going to take us six months to understand, and another six months to really get it working.”

Cost of reforms

Already, however, the costs of the reforms are coming into sharp focus.

Ahead of the changes, ICHA undertook an economic impact analysis putting the expected cost of the changes to homes at between £2,240 and £2,356 per child per year, with an additional one-off cost of £540.33 per child. But now the work has actually begun, the reforms are proving costlier than expected. The location assessments, for example, are taking up about two weeks of registered managers’ time, adding an extra £2,000 a year to the costs for each home.

“There is no doubt that practice is being improved, but it is a much bigger administrative and, therefore, financial drain,” says Stanley. “All of that is okay as long as local authorities understand this work cannot be done at nil cost. We have to be realistic – people have to be funding the development even though it comes at a time when everybody is trying to look at their costs.”

Details of further reforms – including a shake-up of training and the requirement for homes to notify councils when children move placement – remain unknown, so the costs could continue to rise. “There are other things further down the line that we’ve yet to get to understand,” says Stanley. “Until the guidance is published, local authorities don’t quite know the sorts of response they have to make, so there are more changes and more burdens on both local authorities and residential providers to come.”

Thus far, the reforms have emphasised what home operators must do, but the NSPCC says the changes must not stop there. “We have welcomed the proposals put forward by the Department for Education. But a lot of the focus at the moment is on what children’s homes themselves should be doing, whereas we need to be looking at the whole system,” says Tom Rahilly, head of strategy and development for looked-after children at the child protection charity.

“We know from the data and statistics that over a quarter of young people who are coming into residential care have had at least five placements in the care system before they do so, and that around 72 per cent of children in residential care have some form of mental health condition. So we need to be thinking of how local authorities, CAMHS (child and adolescent mental health services) and wider health services, and residential care providers are working together to make sure we are supporting the needs of these children.

“We need a greater focus on what other partners are doing and the approach of an area as a whole, because while there’s a critical role for providers, it’s not something children’s homes should or can do alone.”

Jill Sheldrake is director of social care at the Together Trust, which runs several children’s homes in the north of England. She believes the problems that have affected some residential care providers in the past have been less about the quality of the regulations and more about how well regulations have been enforced.

“If you look at the last published statistics, 72 per cent of children’s homes are rated good or outstanding,” she says. “There have been some elements of poor practice, but I think the previous regulations were strong and it was actually about increasing the enforcement around making sure those regulations were met.”

This is where the new Ofsted inspection framework for children’s homes was supposed to come in, promising a more rigorous focus on improvement. That change has been postponed by a year to take effect from April 2015, so it remains to be seen if the enforcement of regulations will indeed become stronger.

Out-of-authority placements

Sheldrake is also uneasy about the idea of a 20-mile limit on out-of-authority placements, a change discussed recently by the government and MPs on the education select committee. “We have to look at the needs of children rather than the distance,” she says. “If young people have issues around going missing from home or issues with child sexual exploitation involvement or, for a particular reason, there’s a risk for them to be in a particular area, then out-of-area placements are absolutely necessary.”

What needs to be clear is that the decision on placing children outside their local authority must never be about lower-cost placements, she says.

Equally, when looking to make an out-of-authority placement, it must be considered whether the resources required to support the young person being moved are available in the area they are moving to. “The placing authority should be talking to the host authority about whether there are relevant resources for that child and that should be part of the decision making,” Sheldrake says. “That’s why there are lots of issues around areas like Rochdale and Stockport, where they have high levels of children’s homes and lots of those children are out-of-area placements. Are we making sure the host authority is being supported enough by the external placing authority?”

NSPCC’s Rahilly says the most important change will be the new approach to workforce development, which is still to be worked out.

“There is a real need for wider measures to improve the quality of care children are receiving in some homes and regulation changes alone won’t achieve that,” he says. “Research shows, and young people tell us, that what they value is a very strong relationship with a carer or key worker, someone they feel they can turn to and have confidence in. That relationship is at the heart of effective safeguarding. What drives that is leadership, management, the culture and ethos, and the consistency of staffing.”

The NSPCC therefore wants children’s home employees to be better trained on how to spot the signs of sexual exploitation, such as children returning with unexplained gifts or repeatedly going missing.

Sheldrake agrees that raising the minimum qualification levels alone is insufficient. “It is really about looking at what’s needed by residential social workers, who are now dealing with much more complex young people with really significant attachment needs. A concern I have is that we no longer have the benefit of the Children’s Workforce Development Council, which was very much utilised by residential care. We need some support around making sure we have staff that are adequately qualified because the costs of additional qualifications will be increasing when the cost of placements are reducing.”

Jonathan Stanley is involved with the Department for Education working group that is due to come up with plans for developing the children’s home workforce this summer. He says level 3 qualifications for residential care workers need to include much more on understanding and dealing with attachment, trauma, neglect and abuse.

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