Today feels like a significant step forward in improving children’s social care in England. To see the Prime Minister urging reform and promising improvement is itself heartening, as is the speedy decision to take up the challenge of reforming the system comparatively early in the new Government’s life. 

Despite the regular drumbeat of dreadful reports stretching back many years illustrating the broken mess that the system has become, reforming children’s social care has received only half-hearted attention from the Government over the last decade or so. 

Two years ago, the excellent MacAlister review set out a sensible roadmap not only to save the system but to transform it. Since then, it has been immensely frustrating to listen to successive Ministers explain that they were going to make a few tweaks here and there, without tackling the scandal of a system that has failed many children while perversely rewarding hedge fund investors and other wealthy private providers with obscene profits. 

I am very pleased to see this Government set out a clear direction of travel that begins to address that and which chimes with many of the arguments I have been making over many years. 

Measures like the mandating of family group decision making for every family before initiating care proceedings are long-overdue and very welcome. So too is the new focus on boosting educational and employment opportunity. As I have written many times before, none of us would want the lack of ambition prevalent in the current system for our own children. Our ambitions for children in care, on the edge of care, and leaving care must be high and supported by policies and funding that can boost and widen opportunity.

Extending the corporate parenting duty for children in care to a wider range of public bodies is also much needed. The lack of joined-up thinking and information-sharing in the system can be shocking. 

The renewed focus on providing more support for kinship carers, a direction the previous government was moving in as well, is crucial. I have never understood the logic of paying millions to move children into formal care settings when a fraction of this amount could be better invested in helping kinship carers to look after children in a loving, safe, stable, and more welcoming family environment. 

The challenges facing the system are laid bare in the numbers. Last week, the Department for Education published its annual children who are looked after statistics. While the number of children going into care has fallen for the first time in 16 years, the proportion of children going into care aged 16 and over continues to rise, and now accounts for almost one in three of all children in care. 

This demonstrates how we have a system that is not intervening early enough, and which is then having to cope with more and more older children, with complex and expensive needs, entering it. Too many teenage children with multiple adverse childhood experiences are going into care, sometimes into completely unsuitable accommodation, and leaving it not long afterwards without the support they need. This can be disastrous for their safety and future life chances. 

Tackling these problems will require a system that supports families and children much, much earlier.  The Government’s forthcoming Young Futures programme should also play a role in achieving this, and I will continue to press for a much wider and more ambitious programme of early family support to go alongside it. 

As Josh MacAlister’s review made clear, the system needs not only fixes but significant investment. The previous Government was not willing to put in the sums of money required to support root and branch reform, and it is now imperative that this Government takes a much longer term view. The next Comprehensive Spending Review will be a crucial opportunity to do so. 

I remain convinced too that a windfall tax on private providers, as also proposed by the independent review, would be a fair and efficient way of boosting funding to reform the system. In the meantime, the Government should not hesitate for a second to use its new powers to cap provider profits and stop excessive profiteering.

The Education Secretary is right to say that many children in social care have been left feeling forgotten, powerless, and invisible. We have a once in a generation opportunity to put that right. A radical transformation of the way we support families to prevent an ever-increasing number of children going into care, and to rebuild a system that does not bankrupt councils and fail vulnerable teens cannot come soon enough. That process is only just beginning, but the early signs are promising.