Legislation to reform children’s social care requires creation of multi-agency child protection teams, puts agency social work rules into law and enables government to cap care provider profits.
This is article is informed by Community Care Inform legal editor Tim Spencer-Lane’s summary of the bill, published in January 2025.
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill has become law after the two Houses of Parliament agreed a final version of the legislation to reform children’s social care in England.
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, as it will be known, will enact significant chunks of the government’s reform agenda. These include requiring the creation of multi-agency child protection teams, putting rules curbing the use of agency social workers into law and giving ministers the power to cap the profits of placement providers if it deems this necessary.
The bill concluded its passage yesterday after the House of Lords accepted government amendments committing ministers to implementing restrictions on the use of social media by children under 16 following the current consultation on such action.
The issue had been the cause of a holdup in the bill’s completion with opposition parties using their majority in the House of Lords to amend the legislation to impose a social media ban on undr-16s, only for this to be reversed by the government in the Commons.
Despite the focus on social media, the legislation’s primary objectives are to enact reforms to children’s social care and education.
Family group decision making meetings
The new act will support key aspects of the Department for Education’s Families First Partnership (FFP) programme, which is designed to improve family support, keep more children with their families or in kinship care and ensure those at risk of significant harm are better protected.
Under FFP, councils are being encouraged to offer family networks the opportunity to discuss and develop plans to address services’ concerns about children’s welfare through so-called family group decision making (FGDM) meetings.
While the DfE wants authorities to use FGDM meetings at all stages of the targeted early help and children’s social care processes, the act imposes a requirement on councils to offer them to parents when they are considering making an application for a care or supervision order in respect of the child.
If the offer is accepted, the council must hold an FGDM meeting, though neither the duty to offer nor the duty to hold a meeting applies when the council deems this would not be in the child’s best interests.
Multi-agency child protection teams
The act also requires safeguarding partners – local authorities, NHS integrated care boards (ICBs) and police forces – to establish at least one multi-agency child protection team in each council area.
These must comprise a health professional – nominated by the ICB – a police officer – nominated by the constabulary – a person with education experience and a social worker, both of whom must be nominated by the council.
Under the act, a MACPT’s role is to support the local authority discharge its duties, under section 47 of the Children Act 1989, to investigate suspected significant harm to children and determine what action must be taken to safeguard or promote the child’s welfare.
However, the FFP programme guide makes clear that MACPTs will, in effect, take responsibility for these functions. Their roles encompass leading section 47 enquiries, chairing strategy meetings and child protection conferences, overseeing the development, review and closure of child protection plans and deciding whether to move to pre-proceedings.
The DfE wants partners to implement the FFP programme – which is backed by £2.4bn in funding from 2026-29 – by March 2027, and it is likely that the implementation of these aspects of the act will align with this deadline.
Lead child protection practitioner requirements
Regulations under the act will set out minimum requirements for MACPT practitioners, including the social work role, known as the lead child protection practitioner (LCPP).
The DfE has already pledged to create a 12-month development programme for serving or prospective LCPPs, due to launch next year, under which they will be trained to meet a new set of knowledge and skills standards.
It is also considering making the role a protected title, meaning postholders would be required to meet statutory standards and it would be an offence to call yourself an LCPP if you were not performing the role.
Information sharing and the consistent child identifier
Other child protection measures in the act include requiring bodies including councils, ICBs, police forces, probation services and youth justice teams to disclose safeguarding information to one another.
The duty applies where the organisation considers that disclosure would facilitate the receiving organisation to exercise any of its functions to safeguard or promote the welfare of children, unless disclosure would be detrimental to the child.
In addition, the act enables the government to make regulations creating a consistent identifier for each child, which designated persons would have to use when processing information about them.
Putting agency social work rules into law
The act also enables the government to make regulations on councils’ use of agency workers in children’s services, including social workers. These may require that locums meet certain requirements and provide for how they should be managed and the terms on which they are supplied to local authorities.
When in force, this regime would replace the rules, introduced in 2024 under statutory guidance, regarding local authorities’ use of agency social workers in children’s services.
However, as regulations, there would be stronger requirements for councils to abide by them, while they would also apply to children’s services staff other than social workers.
Publishing kinship local offers
The act will additionally require councils to publish information about how they support children in kinship care and kinship carers in their area, as well as financial support which may be available to them locally (the “kinship local offer”).
Councils are already expected to produce such offers – under the DfE’s kinship statutory guidance – but the act bolsters this into a legal requirement.
Local authorities must take such steps as are reasonably practicable to ensure that children in kinship care and kinship carers receive the information in the kinship local offer.
During the bill’s passage, the government amended it to require councils to consult relevant people – including kinship carers and children in kinship care – before publishing their local offers.
Strengthening sibling contact arrangements
Another change made during the passage of the bill was a strengthening of arrangements for children in care to see their siblings.
Councils will be required, under section 34 of the Children Act 1989, to allow children in their care reasonable contact with their siblings, half-siblings or step-siblings.
The duty applies unless disapplied by a court order or if the council is satisfied that refusing contact is necessary to safeguard or promote the child’s welfare and the refusal is decided upon as a matter of urgency and is for no more than seven days.
As stands, councils are required to “endeavour to promote contact” between a looked-after child and their parents, anyone with parental responsibility or any relative, friend or connected person unless this is not reasonably practicable or consistent with the child’s welfare.
However, charities have warned that children in care have not been supported to maintain relationships with their siblings.
Creating regional care co-operatives
The act includes a number of measures designed to tackle the significant challenges councils face in securing sufficient placements of the right quality for children in care.
It gives the government powers to direct two or more local authorities to co-operate in carrying out their functions in relation to accommodating looked-after children, by setting up regional care co-operatives (RCCs).
RCCs, which are being tested in the South East and Greater Manchester, with a further six due to be created later this year, take responsibility from constituent authorities for commissioning care placements. They are designed to give authorities, collectively, more clout with providers, enabling them to control prices and better direct the supply of provision, to prevent children from moving far from home, enduring multiple placement breakdowns or being placed in unsuitable settings.
Children’s minister Josh MacAlister has said he wants RCCs to take responsibility for care placements across England, though the government has not set a timeframe for this.
New deprivation of liberty placement type
One of the biggest challenges councils face is securing appropriate placements for children at the most significant risk, whether due to exploitation, severe trauma, significant mental health problems or complex needs linked to neurodevelopmental conditions.
In recent years, there has been a spike in the number of these children deprived of their liberty under the High Court’s inherent jurisdiction, due to a lack of appropriate placements, often leading to them being placed in illegal unregistered homes.
The act creates a new type of placement under which a child can be deprived of their liberty, in addition to secure children’s homes, bringing more deprivation of liberty cases under a statutory framework.
The legislation empowers the government to issue regulations describing the type of accommodation that should be used, the maximum period a child may be kept in such placements, with or without court authority, and the cohort of children who may be placed in them.
Tackling unregistered placements
According to Children’s Commissioner for England Rachel de Souza, 669 children were in unregistered placements as of 1 September 2025, at a weekly cost of £10,500 each.
Though the number – and cost – of such placements fell from 2024-25, they are significantly higher than was the case at the turn of the decade, while Ofsted has reported that unregistered provision is “typically of poor quality”.
To tackle the issue, the act gives Ofsted new powers to fine breaches of the Care Standards Act 2000, including through the running of unregistered children’s homes, to provide a quicker alternative to prosecution.
Financial oversight of hardest-to-replace providers
The act also introduces a financial oversight regime, operated by the DfE, for children’s social care providers who would be difficult to replace were their businesses to fail.
It gives the government the power to require providers made subject to the regime to submit a “recovery and resolution plan”, setting out risks to their financial sustainability and actions they propose to take in response to these.
The government may also arrange an independent business review of a provider where there is significant financial risk to its sustainability, and is required to warn councils if there is a real possibility of relevant services failing.
The regime resembles one for providers of adult social care operated by the Care Quality Commission.
Power to set profit cap
Through this measure, the creation of RCCs and other actions to boost the supply of placements, the DfE intends to bear down on “profiteering” by providers of children’s social care, an issue about which there has been rising concern in recent years.
However, should this prove insufficient, the act includes a power for the government to cap any profit made by a non-local authority registered children’s social care provider.
MacAlister has signalled that the DfE is inclined to implement the profit cap, though it will first gauge the impact of the financial oversight regime.
“Once we know that we will be able to make a decision about whether to turn on the profit cap,” he told social care leaders in a speech last November. “We all in this room know what things are like at the moment – so read between the lines.”
Improving support to care leavers
As well as taking action on care placements, the act also strengthens support for care leavers, by requiring councils to consider whether those aged up to 25 should receive “staying close” support and, where their welfare requires it, to offer that to them.
This involves providing advice, information or representation to help care leavers find and keep suitable accommodation and to access services relating to health and wellbeing, relationships, education and training, employment and participating in society.
The act also requires councils to publish their arrangements for supporting care leavers in their transition to adulthood and independent living.
