Children’s Social Care

Education Committee

We come now to the second Select Committee statement. Helen Hayes will speak for up to 10 minutes, during which time no interventions may be taken. At the conclusion of her statement, I will call Members to ask questions on the subject of the statement. There should be brief questions, not full speeches. I emphasise that questions should be directed to the Select Committee Chair, not the relevant Minister. Front Benchers may take part in questioning.

I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for this statement. Today I speak on behalf of the Education Committee and, more importantly, the thousands of children across England whose lives are profoundly shaped by our children’s social care system.

I put on record my thanks to the Committee Clerks and specialists, who have supported this inquiry, as well as to Georgia, Jake, Lamar and Louise, the four young adults with recent experience of the care system who came to give oral evidence to the Committee in person. I know that it was not easy to speak about the challenges that they have faced, including experiences that no child should ever have to endure, but by doing so they have helped to shape our report and ensure that young people have been at the centre of our thinking. We are very grateful.

Children’s social care provides essential support to some of our most vulnerable young people—children who have faced trauma, neglect, abuse, bereavement or instability. They need not only protection but love, stability and the opportunity to thrive. In December 2023, our predecessor Committee launched an inquiry into the state of children’s social care. Following the general election, my Committee resolved to continue that critical work. Our inquiry builds on substantial evidence, including the independent review of children’s social care, published in 2022, which concluded that the system was failing to meet children’s needs. The evidence we have received from care-experienced young people, social workers, local authorities, charities and academics confirms that many of these challenges persist.

The system is under significant strain. Rising need, stretched budgets and workforce shortages are compromising the ability to put children genuinely at the heart of the system. We have seen a significant shift in the profile of spending on children’s social care, from spend on early help services, which has fallen 31% in real terms over the last decade, to spend on costly crisis interventions, which has rocketed. This imbalance is unsustainable. The 2022 independent review proposed a £2.6 billion uplift in children’s social care spending between 2023 and 2027, with £1 billion annually ringfenced for family help services, to shift focus toward early intervention. That recommendation has not been fully implemented.

There has been rising need for children’s social care over the past decade, with the number of looked-after children standing at almost 84,000 in 2024—an increase of over 20% since 2014. These pressures reflect broader social and economic challenges. Poverty is a key driver of social care involvement, and the forthcoming child poverty strategy must be ambitious, aiming to significantly reduce the number of children growing up in financial hardship. We urge the Government to allocate a substantial portion of new funding from the spending review to restore early intervention services to 2010 levels in real terms. Prevention is not only the right thing to do by children and their families; it is also more cost-effective.

I congratulate the Chair of the Select Committee on this report and thank her and the Committee for their work on it. I particularly welcome the recommendations on kinship care, which mirror closely the measures in the ten-minute rule Bill that I introduced in this place three years ago and which we on the Liberal Democrat Benches have been campaigning on. I hope she will work cross-party to make sure the Government go further and faster on kinship care.

I want to pick up on the Committee’s recommendations on the adoption and special guardianship support fund. She and I know how distressed the families of children who have been adopted or put into kinship care who need this support are. It is a very small amount of money—does she agree that if the fund could be expanded slightly, all children could go back to having the level of support they had before the cuts were introduced a few months ago?

I thank the hon. Member for her question and for all her interest and work in this important area. The report makes strong recommendations for the Government to make the adoption and special guardianship support fund permanent, to evaluate the impact of the cut in the short term, and to review and make changes to the level of funding if necessary. We know that the Government are looking at changes and improvements, particularly in access to mental health services, so that more children who are adopted can get support through mainstream health services without having to rely on specialist funding as a supplement for that. We think the Government should look carefully at how that goes but not be hesitant to restore the fund if that is needed following monitoring.

I am pleased to have contributed to this report as a member of the Education Committee, which is excellently led by my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes). I also thank the Clerks and staff for all their work on the Committee. It is good that the report has been welcomed by the Centre for Young Lives, the County Councils Network, as well as care leavers charities such as Become.

Will my hon. Friend expand on the section of the report about keeping children safe? Evidence that we heard from our witnesses during the inquiry suggested that the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill was going to do a lot to address their concerns about keeping children in care safe. Despite that, we have still made recommendations about multi-agency working. We have recommended that those agencies have clear processes in place, so that they can review and escalate concerns between different agencies, with a clear line of accountability and decision making to keep children safe and stop them falling through the gaps. Does my hon. Friend agree that it should be a priority for the Department to get those processes in place to prevent those children from falling through the gaps?

I thank my hon. Friend for his question and his contribution to the Committee’s report. He is right—he will recall the distressing evidence that we took, which came in the short aftermath of the verdict in the case of Sara Sharif, who was so badly let down by services that had multiple opportunities to intervene and keep her safe but failed to do so. We welcome the steps that the Government are taking through the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to strengthen joint working, particularly through the single child identifier and other measures around multi-agency working practices. We are calling for the Government to go further, though, because none of us can tolerate seeing any more of those tragic cases in the headlines—the names of children who we remember and who were failed by services that should be there to protect them.

I am immensely grateful to the Chair of the Education Committee for the way she has introduced the report and the work she has done. I am particularly moved by what she said about disabled people, and I wonder if she would look at the relationship between that and special needs education as there is a close association between the two. Will she also look at the issue of the quality of parenting? I was at a school in my constituency just a week ago, and I was told that children are presenting to school really very poorly parented as that is related to the subject that the hon. Lady has studied. It is not all children, of course, but too many are suffering in that way.

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his question and his interest in this area of work. My Committee is looking separately at the issue of special educational needs and disabilities, and we expect to report shortly on that. It is an expansive and lengthy inquiry. He is, of course, right to say that there is some overlap. In relation to children’s social care, we heard from families with disabled children about the multiple difficulties they face with different parts of a system that is not joined-up enough to support them. His question about parenting speaks directly to our recommendation about the need to shift to early intervention, and help and support. In that vein, I welcome the Government’s announcement this week about Best Start family hubs and the expansion of those services, which I believe are trying to do exactly that. We will keep a close watch on how that goes over the coming months.

I thank my hon. Friend for her statement. Like her, I pay tribute to the care leavers who spoke to us, often sharing deeply traumatic stories of their journey through the care system. Their corporate parent is ultimately the state, and we as its custodians must bear the responsibility of ensuring that we support children in care as if they are our own. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is why the Committee’s recommendation that the Government should implement a national care leaver offer is so important, and that doing so would guarantee a consistent approach across local authorities?

I thank my hon. Friend for her question and for her contribution to the report, drawing on her deep experience in this sector prior to coming to this place. Many of us come to this subject area also as parents. I am the parent of a 19-year-old and a 16-year-old, and found the stories that the Committee heard of children cut adrift by services at the age of 18—when young people are still growing into adulthood and need so much help and support—heartbreaking and unacceptable. We are calling for a national care offer, so that wherever care leavers are in the country, they know there is a guaranteed level of support to help them into the next stages of life.

I very much welcome the report, which I look forward to reading in detail. I thank the Committee for all its work on this important matter, and of course the Chair for introducing its many excellent recommendations so comprehensively. There is a lot to go on, but I wish quickly to touch on two points. I declare an interest as a foster carer and adoptive parent, and I fully endorse the report, which highlights the huge widening gap in foster care provision. The emotional appeal for foster carers is powerful, but as the Committee said, it simply is not enough. Does the Chair agree that properly recognising the effort and complexity involved in fostering placements is urgently needed, most importantly for children in care? On support for care leavers, I have heard from too many who, on reaching 18 or even before then, move out of the council area where they were taken into care, so I also endorse the call for a national care leaver offer.

I thank my hon. Friend for his question, and for bringing his personal experience to the debate. I agree with him about foster carers. We looked in detail at the issue, and the gap between the numbers of people expressing an interest in foster care, compared with those who sign up and become foster carers, is enormous. We focused our attention on some of the practical barriers that prevent people from becoming foster parents, especially housing. That is particularly the case for foster carers who might be living in social housing. Housing policy does not adequately support people who might want to come forward but do not have enough space at home, when that is often the responsibility of the same local authority that is their landlord. We think that more could be done to overcome the practical barriers that foster carers face.