Dorset Council wants to reduce the number of children it has in its care

Changes are being considered about how services are commissioned with a more proactive involvement with ‘at risk’ families and quicker decision making from social workers and their managers.

The authority is currently ‘parent’ to 425 young people, some in expensive residential care. It has seen the numbers increase in recent years above both the national and regional rates. Dorset Council is now in the bottom ten for the number of children placed more than twenty miles from home.

Councillors are being told at a Cabinet meeting tomorrow that with average foster placements costing £30,000 a year for each child and other residential care averaging more than £130,000 a year the authority now faces a forecast overspend of £5.5 million for the current financial year in its children’s budget.

Councillors are being told that apart from the financial cost, outcomes for children in care are also worse than their peers, including higher rates of psychological disorders, poorer educational attainment and lower rates of employment.

Dorset is now looking at an approach which involves both early help and crisis intervention and developing an ‘edge of care’ service which can respond better to problems and support families when they are facing challenges.

Children’s services director Sarah Parker says the county needs to react better and faster to the information it, schools and health services, already have about families.

She says the service needs to undergo a change of culture around decision making: “Decisions will need to be made earlier which can impact positively on families and reduce the need for care,” she says.

In a report to councillors she says it is understandable that in a situation where staff feel overwhelmed by demand and have limited budgets, that it may appear to be good sense to wait for a crisis to emerge – but the thinking needs to change.

She suggests that earlier involvement is likely to be key to reducing the number of Dorset children in care, saving money and helping families more effectively: “The main drawback of the approach is that senior managers are drawn into the decision making process too far downstream, where the ability to influence events is limited,” she say in the committee report.

And the director says this change of emphasis may also do away with some of the many panels which have sprung up, sapping manager’s time: “expensive panel structures have proliferated and claimed a significant proportion of the working week for senior managers,” she says.

In Dorset last year (2018) a total of 650 children were looked after during the year with the only age range where the percentage of those leaving the system exceeded starters, was for 1-4 year olds and those 16+, although for the older age group this was mainly because they left the care system altogether.

Dorset also does poorly for children taken into care who later return to live with their parents – 24.3 per cent, compared to the national figure of 32.7 per cent.

Nearly a third of all those who come into care in the Dorset Council area are 10-15, but this rises to 44 per cent, when over 16s are added.