Number of children in care up 60% in 3 years

The number of children in the care of Shropshire Council has soared by more than 60 per cent since the start of the Covid pandemic.

Councillors heard at a meeting on Wednesday that there are now around 660 looked after children in the county, up from 399 just three years ago.

However children’s services bosses say the figure has now stabilised thanks to a number of new measures to support families at the earliest opportunity, allowing more children to stay in their homes.

A report presented to the council’s performance management scrutiny committee said reductions in services during the pandemic “meant that families were not able to get the help and support to make the changes needed in a timely way”.

The report, by Sonya Miller, assistant director for children’s social care and safeguarding, also recognised that there was no dedicated service in place pre-Covid to work with families where children were at risk of becoming looked after. A new pilot scheme plugging this gap, Stepping Stones, was launched in April 2021.

Ms Miller told the committee that the number of looked after children in Shropshire was above average when compared to similar authorities, and said the high number of children aged four and under in care was “a real area of concern”.

She went on to say that 84 per cent of looked after children in Shropshire have a care order in place, obtained through the courts.

“I think that’s a really important figure,” said Ms Miller. “It means that we have met the threshold that these children are being harmed so significantly that the only option is to go to court to get an order to keep them safe, and the court agrees with us.”

Those without a care order, around 110 children, include around 70 unaccompanied asylum seeking children, which Shropshire Council has received under the mandatory national transfer scheme (NTS).

It also covers children with complex disabilities whose parents have asked the council for help, and a small number whose families are voluntarily working with the council with the goal of reunification.

Ms Miller said audits had been undertaken to understand the increases.

She said: “What we found from those audits were that some of those, particularly younger children, that were coming straight into becoming looked after through non-accidental injuries, serious harm and neglect, for some reason they were bypassing the early help offer.

“They weren’t having the opportunity to have the early help support and so there are a number of projects that are in place to try and stop that through the early help offer.

“It’s really important that we do catch families early to make sure that the help is available to them at the earliest opportunity.”

One such scheme is the introduction of a dedicated team of early help workers offering practical support to families within 24 hours of first contact.

Ms Miller said the council was also now seeing the impact of the Stepping Stones initiative, which has worked with 98 children in the last year to prevent them entering the care system or enable them to step out of care.

This has had the affect of stabilising the number of looked after children in Shropshire, which has remained around 660 for the last seven months.

As a result of the success of the Stepping Stones project, its funding has been trebled to allow it to expand next year.

Another area of concern for children’s services is a shortage of foster carers, which has meant children being placed in residential homes rather than fostered.

To combat this, the council has significantly increased foster carers’ allowances and launched a recruitment campaign at the beginning of this year.

Ms Miller said this resulted in 26 enquiries being received from potential new foster carers in January – more than the whole of 2022.