The long-awaited Care Review final report is proposing profound changes for the care system, many of which are long overdue and some of which are quite radical. CVAA have published a helpful summary and commentary on the report from an adoption service perspective. In addition, Family Futures would like to highlight some key issues that relate to the work that we do with children and families in adoption, fostering and kinship care.

• Family Futures are setting up a not-for-profit fostering service because we have been strongly against the trend of the past few decades for fostering and care home provision being provided by private companies making large profits. The report reaches the same conclusion and advocates better support and training for foster carers provided by Regional Care Cooperative services. Family Futures has incorporated into our model of foster care a facilitated support group with other approved foster carers, peer support plus intensive therapeutic support for the child and their carer.

• The report also advocates greater career development opportunities for social workers and the opportunity to specialise. Again this is something we have been providing since the inception of Family Futures. We have supported social workers gaining skills and training in therapeutic work with children and families.

• Another fundamental shift that the report advocates is practitioner managers as seen in the NHS with nurses and doctors maintaining a clinical role alongside that managerial role. Again this is something that Family Futures has always had and has always been positively regarded by Ofsted.

• The report advocates, as Family Futures has, the need for intensive ongoing support for children in need regardless of their placement.

Any radical reforms such as those proposed in this report will inevitably be followed, if implemented, by a period of confusion and chaos, until the new system stabilises. The report proposes a five-year plan for this process of transformation. In our view this will certainly be better than perpetuating the Frankenstein care service that we currently have, that has grown and had new initiatives bolted on over a long period of time, so that what you have is a system that was not intended and poorly integrated.

We hope the Government will take on board the serious concerns the report highlights about the current care system.

by Alan Burnell, co-founder and non-executive director, Family Futures, June 2022