Oxfordshire County Council sees fewer children entering care

Children must be protected from harm. This is my number one priority as the county council’s cabinet member for children, education and youth services.

We’re already radically improving the safety of children in their families, preventing harm, and achieving long-term improvements to parenting.

We’re making big strides in the right direction, with a collaborative approach pivotal to our success.

I want to share with you what we’ve achieved and how we’ve gone about it.

Family Solutions Plus

Family Solutions Plus is our new approach to children’s social work, started in November 2020 across Oxfordshire.

At its heart is a consistent relationship between a social worker and a family, working together to get to the nub of parents and children’s everyday experiences, behaviours and needs.

It is forensic in its investigation of risks, being up front and transparent with parents and carers about concerns, while also encouraging, motivating, and tracking progress when helping them to care for their children more safely.

Social workers get to know their families well, so it is less likely that worrying signs will be missed and more likely that trust and honesty are established, and help is accepted.

A large number of the children we work with are badly affected by poor health and relationship problems in the adults caring for them.

Our service places adult mental health, drug and alcohol, and domestic abuse workers in teams with children’s social workers, working to a whole family plan.

These multidisciplinary teams work with families to tackle parental vulnerabilities and support children to remain safe within their families.

The teams work in communities alongside extended family and friends, health visitors, school nurses, teachers, voluntary organisations, police, and probation officers – all working together to keep children safe.

It reminds me of the well-known proverb ‘it takes a village to raise a child’.

Be kind and care

Family Solutions Plus was designed collaboratively by our social care workers and families, led by the senior operational managers who best know their teams, the quality of their work and their challenges.

We were determined not to take a top-down approach. It was about listening, understanding what happens in the real world, discussing on the ground experiences.

One of the council’s new values is ‘be kind and care’. This has always been central to the way our teams work and think and it was crucial that we show kindness and care to the families that need our help.

Every child should have an equal opportunity in life and every parent should be given the opportunity to become empowered and effective.

Some face greater challenges and barriers than others and this is a key reason why we’ve created the new model, so we can switch our focus to being more preventative and address the parental needs that underpin abuse and neglect.

Family Solutions Plus is about everyone taking responsibility – social workers, families, and young people. I see it as a partnership.

What we did

Our goal has been to create something designed in Oxfordshire for the benefit of families living in the county.

From the start, we drew inspiration and guidance from other authorities’ best practice in multi-agency working and integrated models, such as Hampshire and Hertfordshire’s.

But we needed to think hard about our own challenges, what strengths we had already grown and what our vision was.

Operational managers came together with their teams of social workers to review practice and identify the key elements of what works.

Our public health colleagues funded a frontline pilot project in which experienced drug and alcohol workers went out to help parents – alongside social care staff undertaking joint duty work, assessment and plans – and reporting case studies on their findings.

Our partnership with Cherwell District Council included an innovative trial to tackle the causes and consequences of family homelessness.

The impact on children in Oxfordshire

We have started to see a positive impact. The number of children at risk of neglect and abuse is coming down (eight per cent fewer starting a child protection plan).

We have also seen fewer children needing to enter care (down by 12 per cent) for the first time in six years.

We still work with more families in need of support than we would like, but we are pleased that the early signs are good and by continuing to act preventatively we will in time see fewer children at risk of serious harm and fewer needing our intervention.

Oxfordshire is no different from other areas of the country in seeing high levels of demand for children’s services throughout the pandemic.

Our teams are under considerable pressure and, like everywhere nationally, we are struggling with a shortage of social workers.

But, arguably, we would be in a worse position without our new positive approach to child protection.