With 4.3 million children now living in poverty¹ and over 2 million families struggling financially or with their mental health² combined with high-cost services and increased demand, we are seeing unprecedented pressures on already stretched budgets – and, critically, poor outcomes for children. A funding gap of £800 million in England for Children’s Social Care alone in 2022/23³ is further compounded by challenges in attracting and retaining a skilled and experienced workforce to both meet this increased demand, and to provide support to children and families to meet their needs.

These challenges were echoed at a recent series of roundtables 31ten facilitated with Lead Members for Children’s Services and Finance. These conversations showed a real willingness on the part of representatives from different geographies to work together to share solutions and strategies to address these challenges. In practice, this has resulted in:

• Sharing of business cases for investment in local prevention initiatives
• Regional collaboration on recruitment and commissioning
• Sharing of positive examples around the use of digital tools
• Better utilisation of physical assets
• Joint working with Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) and wider system partners to improve services for young people with SEND.

This appetite for joint working shows how professionally curious council staff and members are – they are constantly on the lookout for ideas that would fit or could be adapted to their own local context and meet the needs of their local communities. It is this spirit of innovation (and a dose of resilience) that will see councils work to make the best of Local Government Reform and capitalise on the many opportunities it offers.

These reforms have the potential to increase economies of scale and align public service footprints. While the governance and structures created to enable this transformation are important, what is more critical are the relationships between individuals across different agencies and their will to work together to make change happen. Our roundtables have left us optimistic about the strength of these relationships which, combined with multi-year funding settlements, will help to remove some of the friction and issues that funding (or lack thereof) creates in joint working. Funding pressures will remain, continuing to test these relationships, and therefore we recommend honest conversations at the outset to explore some key questions:

• How do we capitalise on a larger footprint? Councils need to think about how their new footprint can align to local health partners, the increased buying power that comes with an increase in scale and how best to use the convening powers of regional governance to advance key agendas. We have seen examples of how this can work – in the West Midlands, which has a shared framework for Children’s Services – but also the difficult journey to develop something that serves all partners and managing this to create a useful output for all involved.
• What needs to remain local? Whilst the focus of devolution tends to be on the advantages of scale, we know that areas across the country are already working on local and hyper local approaches to prevention and early help – we think this approach will still be vital even as organisations get bigger. The positive impacts of Family Hubs, Youth Services and the opportunities presented by the new Prevention Grant mean that local services will still be required no matter what governance looks like in the future.
• And most importantly, how to ensure children and young people are prioritised? We know from experience that children and young people can easily get lost in regional conversations, with hospital discharge or support for babies often being the focus, missing out most children and the opportunity to intervene early across the age range. The reforms provide an opportunity to use a collective voice to ensure children and young people are on the agenda at all levels. We have seen the benefits that regional working has delivered in adoption and with the mounting pressure increases in demand for support of children and young with SEND continues to create in both councils and the NHS, these reforms can be used as a chance to get system priorities in order.

At 31ten, we collaborate with councils across the country and their partners to facilitate these types of conversations and support the development of joint working.

Please get in touch with Joe if you would like to discuss how we can support your organisation to make the most of the opportunities the Local Government Reform presents and deliver better outcomes for the children and families you serve.

¹ New poverty stats show highest ever number of children living in poverty in the UK | Action For Children

² Report from the UK Committee for UNICEF (UNICEF UK) – October 2022

³ ADCS_Childhood_Matters_FINAL.pdf