This week, the Government published their provisional local government finance settlement for 2025 to 2026 which sets out the amount of funding given to local councils to provide the vital services that our communities rely on. I was pleased to see the government building on some of the positive measures they set out in the Autumn Budget, by giving children’s services the attention and focus they have been largely lacking these previous 14 years. Particularly welcomed was the increase in funding through the Social Care Grant, alongside the Children’s Social Care Prevention Grant which will be used to invest in the national rollout of Family Help. It is great to see a shift towards prevention as this is the best way to protect our most vulnerable children.

The tide certainly seems to have started to turn with the Children’s Wellbeing Bill, currently working its way through Parliament, likely to become the first significant piece of education law in England for ten years. The measures outlined in the new legislation aimed at elective home education, empowering local authorities to improve inclusion, and ensuring transparency in the care placement market will be a big step towards ensuring better safeguarding measures are in place.   ADCS look forward to collaborating with the government and other stakeholders to ensure that these reforms bring about a meaningful difference in children’s lives and life chances.

And it is this collaboration that is key. It’s really welcome to see that the government has reaffirmed the commitment to multi-agency working, both in the Budget and the DfE policy paper, Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive. Local authorities need the support of our schools, health services and police so, the expansion of corporate parenting duties to a range of new organisations can’t come soon enough, helping to ensure that the needs of children in care and care experienced young people are explicitly considered in everything they do.

Perhaps one of the most exciting announcements to come out of our new government was their intention to “crack down on care providers making excessive profit”. ADCS has been raising the alarm about this for years and are clear that it will never be acceptable for large corporations and private equity backed companies to make unacceptable, and quite frankly immoral, levels of profit on the back of our vulnerable children. But it’s not just about profits, often the complex and opaque ownership arrangements of such companies mean that it is almost impossible to understand where decisions are made and where the accountability lies when providers decide to exit the market because it no longer fits their business model or provision does not meet the test, ‘is it good enough for my child?’ We stand ready and willing to work with the Department for Education as it moves forward to implement these measures and send a strong message to those who have taken advantage for too long.

The foundations that children need to thrive are now absent for a large proportion of children, which results in them arriving at our door in need of help. This isn’t good for children, families or wider communities. We need to stop pushing problems onto others and work effectively and collaboratively, with children and families in the round, if we are ever going to achieve the ambition of making childhood matter. But I am hopeful that this government is shifting the dial, and whilst the devil will be in the detail, I am looking forward to working to ensure that children are at the centre of government next year and beyond.