What is this plan for? The purpose and content of children in need plans

There is a group of just over 400,000 children living in England who are defined as ’children in need’, because they have been identified as needing meaningful intervention from the state to support their development, prevent problems in their home lives from escalating or to help if they are disabled.  

Around a quarter of these children, as of 31^st March 2023, have child in need plans. These children have varied needs: they might be a young carer, or are being targeted for criminal exploitation, or have a parent struggling with substance misuse or domestic abuse, or they might be disabled.  

Child in need plans are a fundamental part of our child protection system. When implemented well, they are one of the few tools the state has to prevent children from being taken into care and to keep families together safely – and thousands of children are reliant on these plans to grow up healthy and safe.  

But in their current form, it is impossible to meaningfully assess how effective child in need plans are as an intervention. The findings of this report make the case for bold reform for children and families, beginning with clear national thresholds of need to guide practice in local authorities and a national outcomes framework that assesses the effectiveness of the help given to families so we can avoid a postcode lottery. No child’s outcomes should be determined by workload pressures or poor local decision-making, or left open to interpretation according to individual plans.  

Earlier this year I pointed to the 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. Now, through a thorough examination of these plans, and engagement with social workers and families with experience of plans, 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. 

For children and families in need of these vital services, this is an all too familiar story. It is one that is reflected in the breadth of my recent work, from support for Special Educational Needs (SEN), to waiting times for mental health issues, to a lack of attention paid to children missing from education. Children’s individual needs, and their family circumstances, should be at the heart of how these services operate – but as this report sets out, too often they are an afterthought in a fragmented system where support is contingent on whether there is capacity locally to provide help. 

Furthermore, it shows that even when plans are in place, families – and even the professionals creating them – say they can be vague and confusing, without achievable actions, no clear timeframes for improvements and delivered with poor communication. This report and its new in-depth analysis of a sample of plans, finds that an overwhelming majority (85%) of actions recorded within them did not meet my criteria for a ‘high quality’ action. This means that for the majority of actions – essential steps that must be completed to reach the plan’s overall objective of protecting and supporting a vulnerable child – it was difficult to assess what had been done and whether progress had been made when the plans ended.  

Documents explaining why child in need plans are closed often did not provide information on whether the original source of concern – and the reason the plan was created in the first place – had been addressed. Instead, I found that many factors can influence why a plan closes – including, for example, the quality of the relationship between the social worker and the parent, rather than anything to do with the underlying needs of the child at the centre of the plan.  

Nearly three-quarters (72%) of the plan did not make reference to timeframes for the interventions in place to support families, making it hard to track progress between visits and review meetings.  Local authorities publish their own visit timeframes, so visits by professionals varied in frequency by area – and it appears that disabled children are visited less frequently than other children on these plans.  

Almost 1 in 25 (4%) of children on child in need plans for concerns around their safety and development had not been visited in more than three months. For vulnerable families relying on professional intervention, those three months could mean the difference between an opportunity to build a stable life, or reaching crisis point with an altogether more tragic conclusion. 

The government’s upcoming Children’s Wellbeing Bill is a critical opportunity to examine how we are using this vital statutory early intervention to support vulnerable children and ultimately to keep families together across the country.  

In this report I have set out a series of recommendations that, if implemented, would create meaningful reform for children and families. This starts with a comprehensive review of the Children Act 1989 that lays the foundation for local action that better supports families. We need clearly defined national thresholds of need for children and families, under section 17 of the Children Act, to guide local practice. We need to set a uniform approach nationally for how often children receive help and how frequently that help is reviewed. We also need a comprehensive National Child in Need Outcomes Framework to measure the effectiveness of the help that children and families receive. 

Only with these key changes will child in need plans live up to their purpose of early intervention that keeps families safely together, and puts their needs – and crucially, children’s experiences – at the heart of our child protection system.