With councils paying £10,000 a week for some care placements, Rachael Wardell highlights “moral dichotomy” of accepting this while not supporting parents financially to enable children to stay at home
Finally! The President of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) recognises what we have been saying for many years: that poverty is why so many children are in “care”. Councils must prioritise giving families money instead of £millions to foster carers & private companies. This would stop so many children going into “care” and be a huge improvement to the lives of children and their mums. We want a Care Income Now for all carers of people and planet and we say: Take Away our Poverty, NOT our children.
By Mithran Samuel July 18, 2025
The Association of Directors of Children’s Services’ (ADCS) president has mooted making payments to families to prevent children going into care.
Rachael Wardell raised the idea as something for the government to consider in drawing up its child poverty strategy, due this autumn, in her speech to last week’s annual ADCS conference.
She said “one of the moral dichotomies in policy” was the acceptance that councils fund placements for children in care but that there was “no clear offer of financial support to birth families to enable children to remain in the family home”.
Wardell, the director of children’s services in Surrey, characterised this as an example of policy tackling the symptoms of poverty but not its root causes, which was that “families simply do not have enough money”.
Poverty ‘has impact on parents’ ability to care for children’
In an interview with Community Care after the speech, Wardell said a key priority for the child poverty strategy was for the government to scrap the two-child cap, which prevents parents from claiming universal credit for more than two children.
Rachael Wardell (photo supplied by ADCS)
She said that, if four siblings were taken into care, a foster family would receive “more for a week than a family on benefits would get for only two of those siblings for an entire month”.
“How can we not see that the impact on families in that level of poverty and need will have a bearing on their ability to care well for their children?”
‘Natural justice for children’
Wardell said it was “natural justice for children that we don’t treat one child less favourably than another child”.
Children’s charities and anti-poverty groups have long called for the scrapping of the two-child cap, introduced in 2017, with the policy being one factor behind the higher rates of relative child poverty among families with three or more children (44%) compared with those with two children (25%).
The government is considering the move but its self-imposed limits on borrowing, commitments not to raise income tax, VAT or national insurance rates and other spending pressures, including the need to fund the recent U-turn on disability benefits cuts, mean its ability to do so is constrained.
Beyond ditching the two-child cap, Wardell said consideration should be given to making payments to families to enable children to stay at home.
While councils may give cash payments to families to fulfil their duties to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in need, under section 17 of the Children Act 1989, local authority procedures tend to state this should only happen in “exceptional circumstances”, even though this qualifier was removed from the law in 2008.
£10,000 a week for care placements
Wardell pointed to the significant sums councils were spending on care placements – particularly for teenagers in residential care – as a rationale for considering payments to families.
“We ought to be asking ourselves, ‘How much would we be paying for these children if they come into foster care, how much would we pay for children in residential care and what therefore would it be sensible to allocate to make provision to support them at home?’,” she said. “When we talk about teenagers, we might be talking about £10,000 a week [for a residential placement].”
According to a 2023 Local Government Association (LGA) report, councils’ projected expenditure on placements in 2023-24 was £5.4bn, £680m more than they had budgeted. And while there were 120 placements costing £10,000 a week or more in 2018-19, this had ballooned to over 1,500 by 2022-23, the LGA found.
This has been driven by factors including a rising care population, a growing complexity of need among young people in care in recent years and shortages of suitable placements driving up prices paid by councils.
Reforms designed to cut size of care population
Countering these costs, both by increasing the supply of placements and limiting their cost, and by reducing the number of children going into care, is a key objective of the government’s children’s social care reforms.
The key vehicle for reducing the size of the care population is the Department for Education’s (DfE) Family First Partnership programme, which started to be rolled out across England in April 2025, backed by £523m in annual funding, half of it new, from 2025-29. The programme comprises:
- The establishment of multidisciplinary family help teams, working with families at targeted early help, child in need and child protection levels, to provide them with earlier, less stigmatising support, coupled with consistent relationships with practitioners.
- The rollout of family group decision making meetings (FGDMs), enabling extended families to have meetings to make decisions about children’s welfare, including by providing kinship care alternatives to them going into care. Under the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, councils will be under a duty to offer these meetings at the pre-proceedings stage.
- The setting up of multi-agency child protection teams, including social workers, education professionals, police officers and health practitioners, to improve the quality of safeguarding practice, including by enhancing inter-agency working and information sharing.
Evaluation of pathfinders
Wardell’s conference speech came on the day that the DfE released the report of an initial evaluation of the testing of the reforms in 10 pathfinder areas, from 2023-25.
It found that staff anticipated that the reforms would “drive positive outcomes for them including the strengthening of existing partnerships, increased understanding of families’ needs, reduction in caseloads and reduced paperwork, which they feel, could enhance job satisfaction”.
Practitioners also felt that there were signs of a positive impact on families, including them receiving support earlier and having a better experience of child protection conferences, though they acknowledged it was too early to draw firm conclusions.
However, the report did pose questions about non-social work staff – known as “alternatively qualified practitioners” – holding child in need cases, as is being promoted through the reforms and has been enabled by 2023 changes to the Working Together to Safeguard Children statutory guidance.
Non-social work staff holding child in need cases
Concerns about alternatively qualified practitioners holding cases have been raised by the British Association of Social Workers, Ofsted and, more recently, Eileen Munro, whose critique of the reforms was echoed by a group of social workers from a high-performing council in a recent Community Care article.
The pathfinders evaluation found that alternatively qualified staff were “less confident in their understanding of how to assess and manage risk in section 17 cases compared to social workers”.
At the same time, “social workers were apprehensive about alternatively qualified staff in family help lead practitioner (FHLP) roles holding these child in need cases under the new model, as this was a greater level of responsibility than they were used to”.
In her interview with Community Care, Wardell highlighted this as an issue councils were grappling with.
Concerns over alternatively qualified practitioners taking on complex cases
“Alternatively qualified practitioners are a brilliant resource and will help us to maintain relationships and keep continuity of practitioner with family throughout their work with us, but there is also a worry that not all alternatively qualified practitioners feel safe and confident to practise with families with more demanding needs and more risks attached,” she said.
“And there are concerns that they may miss things or not recognise when needs are escalating. So people are wanting to both value their experience and everything they bring, but are also anxious about whether that leaves a vulnerability.”
She said there was unlikely to be a single model across England for how best to deploy alternatively qualified staff in family help teams.
‘No one-size-fits-all approach’
One option, she said, was giving adult practitioners who worked alongside children’s social workers under the family safeguarding model case-holding responsibility at the child in need level; another, was to give this role to family support or targeted youth support workers already working with families in early help.
“I think pathfinders are exploring those avenues and other local authorities will deploy models like that, at the pace that they think is appropriate and given what the available practitioners are locally and the kind of work they’re finding is needed with their families,” Wardell added. “I don’t foresee there being a one-size-fits-all model.”
In her critique of the reforms, Munro warned that seeking to change a “very complex child protection system that has evolved over a very long period” in one go was “very, very likely to fail”.
While not going nearly as far as this, Wardell told the ADCS conference that many councils were proceeding with “understandable caution” with the reforms, saying that they were working in “a delicate ecosystem that needs to be carefully managed”.
‘Inherent risks in sheer amount of reform’
As well as the challenges of the reforms itself, councils were also operating in a challenging context, amid changes to the NHS, a review of the funding of local government and plans to reorganise councils by replacing existing county and district authorities with unitaries, she added.
“There are inherent risks in the sheer amount of reform coming at us from every direction,” Wardell told the conference.
In her interview with Community Care, she added: “Authorities feel positive about many of the reforms, positive that there is funding but anxious about some of the other change that is coming alongside, things like local government reorganisation, the new funding settlement, changes that are happening in the NHS, all of which could potentially get in the way.”
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