Research in Practice and Data to Insight deliver the Safeguarding Pressures 9 report for the Association of Directors of Children's Services (ADCS).
The mixed methods research brings rich evidence on the current safeguarding pressures on Children’s Services. Multiple housing concerns, health challenges such as delayed access to assessment or treatment plans, and the lasting impact of COVID-19 is impacting children, young people and families.
Alongside new insights into these pressures, the report provides data showing the real and positive impact of sustained investment in early help to children, young people and families in reducing pressures on statutory child protection and care services.
Safeguarding Pressures headlines
Research has shown changes in safeguarding activity, such as:
Health challenges
For the first time, poor parental mental health has overtaken domestic abuse as the most common factor in children’s social care assessments.
A range of health challenges were highlighted, from the impact of delayed access to assessment or treatment plans for children and for parents and carers, particularly for alcohol and substance misuse as well as for mental health.
Three quarters of respondents also reported an increase in safeguarding demand over the last two years due to children’s mental health.
Multiple housing concerns
Children and families are being unable to access good quality housing with overcrowding, growing use of temporary accommodation and the unaffordability of housing contributing to family distress and breakdown against the backdrop of a cost-of-living crisis.
Children’s Services are routinely supplementing rents under Section 17 duties of the Children Act 1989 to sustain families and keep them together, this is unsustainable. Challenges linked to an increasingly transient population, often moving far and/or often due to high housing costs, were also raised as a direct pressure on the safeguarding and child protection system.
A lasting impact of COVID-19 on children and young people’s lives
The impact of the pandemic on children and young people has been significantly underestimated and will endure for many years to come without more focus, attention and investment.
There are increasingly visible and growing levels of mental health need among children plus their parents and carers, via heightened inequalities, deteriorating behaviour in schools resulting in rising exclusions as well as social and developmental delays in younger children. Families are less resilient and have more entrenched and overlapping needs and challenges as the pandemic aggravated or accelerated needs.
Important safeguarding trends
The research showed other notable safeguarding trends, such as:
Poverty was consistently raised as a safeguarding concern. A new cohort of working families are no longer managing to make ends meet in the cost-of-living crisis. The impacts of poverty on health, relationships, family functioning and the policy drivers from other government departments such as welfare and immigration, were noted.
Early help assessments for child sexual exploitation, trafficking and gangs have doubled over the two-year research period. Similarly, assessments with child criminal exploitation as a factor rose. This is likely to better identification and understanding of these types of abuses as safeguarding concerns rather than crimes.
Securing the right placements at the right time for children in care was a top concern, particularly meeting the needs of those with the most complex and multifaceted needs, costing tens of thousands of pounds per week.
Managing pressures in the SEND system, largely driven by in an exponential growth in demand for assessments and support and chronic underfunding, echoing other recent research and reports.
Increased safeguarding activity due to children’s online activity. Children creating or distributing explicit imagery, being groomed or sexually extorted to viewing violent pornography or radicalisation videos.
There is a growing cohort of unaccompanied asylum-seeking (UAS) children who arrive in this country alone and enter care.
About the research
Research in Practice, in partnership with Data to Insight is delighted to have led this latest round of Safeguarding Pressures commissioned by ADCS.
This is the ninth phase of the ADCS Safeguarding Pressures series that highlights pressures facing children’s safeguarding services from 2007–08 to 2023–24. It focuses the needs of children and families and the efforts of those trying to support them to live good lives.
The research shows some of the challenges that local authorities face as they support children and families in their areas and the impacts of services, systems and workforce activity. The latest report brings together longitudinal quantitative data, high response rate survey data and interview reflections from Directors of Children’s Services. Our grateful thanks to all involved.
Child Safeguarding Practice Reviews – Learning Support Project
Exploring how high-quality learning can be gained from serious incidents to better protect children and young people.