HANSARD
Children’s Social Care: Enduring Relationships Strategy
- Transforming children’s social care is central to our mission to break down the barriers to opportunity. It is fundamental to ensuring that every child grows up safe, supported and able to thrive. Today we are publishing the enduring relationships strategy, which sets a clear direction for children’s social care in England by placing relationships at the heart of the system’s purpose.This publication builds upon our recent work to legislate for social care reform, reset how the system operates and give our partners clarity on delivery. The enduring relationships strategy establishes a guiding principle, bringing coherence to reforms by placing relationships at the heart of the system. The independent review of children’s social care called for a relentless focus on family networks, reunification and other forms of permanence that promote lifelong relationships to support the best outcomes for care-experienced children that endure into adulthood.The evidence is clear: a single stable, trusted and loving relationship can transform a child's life, improving resilience, health, education and their long-term outcomes. There are professionals across the sector working tirelessly to support children to build and sustain trusted relationships.However, this is too often dependent on individual commitment rather than reliable structures. Children can experience multiple moves, separation from family and community, and too often leave care without the networks of support that most young people rely on. The enduring relationships strategy addresses this directly. At its heart is a simple but fundamental idea: the purpose of the children’s social care system must be to build, protect and sustain children’s enduring relationships, so that they can feel safe, supported and able to thrive.To enable this, our reforms are aligned to four key outcomes, and supporting enduring relationships is the golden thread that runs between them.First: focusing practice on enduring relationshipsRelationships should be treated not as an add-on, but as the core purpose of practice and the lens through which all professional judgment is exercised. This is reflected in the families first partnership programme, where mandatory family group decision making will ensure that children’s families and wider networks are involved in decisions about their care at an earlier stage. In addition, the Government have strengthened local authorities’ duties to promote sibling contact for children in care.At every stage of decision making, the system should consider not only whether a child is safe, but who matters to that child and how those relationships can be enabled and sustained.Second: creating homes for enduring relationships