As I draft this blog, I am reminded of National Storytelling Week which offers a timely reminder that stories are one of the most powerful tools humans possess. Originating from the Society for Storytelling, the week encourages communities to pause and consider how stories connect us across generations and cultures, and how they help us navigate challenge, change and uncertainty. Storytelling isn’t just about sharing tales, but also about shaping identity, building empathy and giving meaning to complexity.

Children, families and practitioners all carry stories that shape their experience of the system. As leaders, we also carry responsibility for the bigger narrative: the story of how our local areas, our partnerships and our national frameworks come together in service of children’s wellbeing.

For those of us who have recently experienced an inspection, the process itself is a kind of storytelling. It requires clarity, coherence and honesty about where a service is on its journey.

In my own local experience, inspection required us to tell “the Luton story” – a story of improvement, partnership and collective ambition and a system continually learning and improving, shaped by the voices of children and the dedication of practitioners. Across the ADCS membership, directors recognise this truth: inspection is never just about compliance. It is about how we describe our purpose, our progress and our aspirations as leaders within a complex and evolving system, and how we demonstrate the positive outcomes for our children and families.

The government’s recent commitment to create 10,000 additional foster care places, supported by new investment and national recruitment measures, marks a clear ambition to strengthen the system. The accompanying reform plan sets out further actions intended to expand capacity and modernise fostering practice.

Whilst these aims are welcome, it is important to hold them in the context of our story: that local authorities and regions have already been working hard to innovate, recruit and support carers, often in challenging conditions. The scale and pace of the national proposals will, therefore, need careful consideration to ensure they build on, rather than unintentionally disrupt the progress already being made.

The ADCS Health, Care & Commissioning Policy Network exists at the intersection of children’s social care, public health, NHS transformation, commissioning and system reform. We will continue to engage constructively to help shape reforms that are ambitious, realistic and grounded in the lived realities of children’s services.

Amidst the current wave of reform, the story of children’s services in England is still being written. It is a story of challenge, ambition and transformation, but also one of deep commitment, compassion and resilience. Whether in inspection, integration, commissioning or reform, our collective responsibility is to ensure the story we tell is honest, hopeful and grounded in the lived realities of children and families.

And ultimately, the most important story is not ours, it is theirs. Our role as leaders is to ensure the systems we shape today allow children to look back with a story of safety, belonging, opportunity and love.

That is the story we must keep telling together.