Children’s Commissioner calls for new national guidelines for child in need plans

Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel De Souza, has called upon the government to  introduce national guidelines on how local authorities deliver child in need plans.

Her study of a number of existing plans concluded that it is currently impossible to meaningfully assess how effective child in need plans are as an intervention. She also noted a lack of consistency across the country and for different groups of children when it comes to how judgements are made about what level of support is available through a child in need plan. Plans, she says, can be “vague and confusing, without achievable actions, no clear timeframes for improvements and delivered with poor communication.”

She concludes that “It has become starkly clear that the needs and voices of children are too often being overlooked due to administrative concerns such as: budgets, caseloads, and the availability of local resources. Children’s individual needs, and their family circumstances, should be at the heart of how these services operate but too often they are an afterthought in a fragmented system where support is contingent on whether there is capacity locally to provide help.

She calls upon ministers to provide “clearly defined national thresholds of need for children and families, under section 17 of the Children Act, to guide local practice and a uniform approach nationally for how often children receive help and how frequently that help is reviewed.”