Councils risk losing their share of children’s social care reform funding if they divert it to cover spending pressures, Josh MacAlister has warned.
The children’s minister said the Department for Education (DfE) would monitor authorities’ use of the £2.4bn in Families First Partnership (FFP) funding over the next three years and claw money back if it wasn’t spent on the right purposes.
MacAlister made the comments at an Institute for Government (IfG) event on the DfE’s children’s social care reform agenda, held this week.
About the Families First Partnership programme
FFP is the most significant element of the government’s children’s social care reforms and comprises three elements:
- Multidisciplinary family help services: these are responsible for supporting families across targeted early help, child in need and child protection. They involve the provision of a consistent lead practitioner and a team around the family, to carry out direct work and source other support with the objective of keeping children with their parents where it is safe to do so.
- Family group decision making (FGDM) meetings: these involve giving extended families the opportunity to hold meetings and develop plans to safeguard children involved with early help or social care. In some cases, councils will then provide family network support packages (FNSPs) – comprising money, goods or services – to help family networks turn their plans into reality. FGDM is designed to ensure children stay within their extended families wherever possible and do not go into care.
- Multi-agency child protection teams: these are designed to improve the quality of safeguarding practice by bringing together skilled social workers, police officers, health practitioners and education professionals into single teams, improving information sharing and inter-agency collaboration, and ensuring children are better protected from harm.
Funding may be withdrawn, MacAlister warns councils
The programme is designed to shift resource from late to early intervention, reducing the numbers of children in care or subject to child protection plans through better family support, reversing the trends of much of the past 15 years.
MacAlister told the IfG event that the sector had “one shot to prove the argument that if we put more money into early intervention with families into skilled interventions, we can really shift the balance of services”.
He said that, by the end of the period, the DfE wanted to see “more money permanently spent on family help without the need for more ongoing government grants”, through funding released from reductions in the number of children in care reinvested in early intervention.
“This is a three-year programme to reset the system,” he added. “Either you are on the bus with that, or you’re off the bus with that. And if you’re not, the money stops.”
Children’s social care funding requirements
The FFP funding – worth £853.1m this year – is being delivered through the children, families and youth grant, which is ringfenced for councils to spend on the three elements of FFP, without displacing existing spending on preventive services.
Councils and their partners are expected to have fully implemented family help, multi-agency child protection teams and FGDM by 31 March 2027, with the roughly £1.6bn in funding from 2027-29 designed to boost investment in these services.
The grant conditions for 2026-27 allows councils to use the money for “transformation” activity, including increasing leadership capacity for the reforms, engaging children and families in the process and supporting partner agencies to implement aspects of the changes.
MacAlister told the IfG event that there was flexibility over how councils used the funding to implement the elements of FFP.
However, he warned: “But if they are saying, ‘We’ve got this money for this, but we’re spending it on that because that’s where our pressures are,’ that’s not ok.”
How DfE is monitoring compliance
The DfE is monitoring compliance with the programme by requiring councils to submit quarterly reports on their activity and spending, including on:
- The implementation status of their family help and FGDM services and multi-agency child protection teams.
- The total number of children receiving family help services, with the expectation that this increases quarter on quarter in 2026-27 and constitutes all of those under targeted early help and child in need by March 2027.
- The total number of children receiving an intervention from a multi-agency child protection team, with the expectation this increases quarter on quarter in 2026-27 and constitutes all of those under child protection by March 2027.
- The numbers of children for whom offers of FGDM are made, and for whom FGDM meetings are facilitated.
Councils face intervention for not meeting requirements
Under the grant guidance, the DfE will provide an “enhanced level of support and challenge to those areas that do not demonstrate expected levels of delivery progress”.
Where failure to comply with grant conditions has a negative impact on children’s services and this is the result of “systemic weakness in leadership, governance and culture”, the DfE or Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) may consider intervening in the authority to drive progress.
MacAlister echoed this at the IfG event, saying: “If we see a local authority that isn’t moving money into prevention and is instead increasing funding on care placements, that could become a reason for intervention in future.”
The grant guidance also states that if any of the conditions for receiving the money are not met, the government may “reduce, suspend or withhold grant payments or require the repayment of the whole or any part of the grant monies paid”.
Emphasising the importance of FFP succeeding, MacAlister added: “This has to be a transformation that sticks, which bakes in an England where more children are being cared for by their families, and where children need to be looked after, we’re more capable of generating the tribe around that child, which will more often be aunty, uncle, someone who knows that kid.”
DCS sounds alarm over council funding pressures
Alongside him, Rachael Wardell, the immediate past president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, said: “I think it’s completely reasonable for there to be grant conditions attached, and for us to abide by them and report on them.”
However, Wardell, who is the director of children’s services in Surrey, warned that councils were dealing with significant pressures in the context of a long-term reduction in funding for local government.
“Overall that injection of cash represents 1% of spend in my department,” she added. “And everything else that the additional funding is spent on comes from the council tax payer or the business tax payer. If that gets squeezed, then there are things that I cannot do.”
