Looked After Children JSNA

Summary

Strategic Issue 1

Local data suggests an increase in complexity and support needs and the requirement for rapid intensive intervention.

Hartlepool’s looked after children population is shifting toward the age groups with the strongest predictors of care entry nationally (infancy and adolescence), suggesting increasing complexity and support needs. Hartlepool has a more complex, higher-need cohort than regional or national averages for abuse- and disability-related need.

What needs to be done

Prevention

  • Develop an Early Help offer focused on pregnancy to age 2 and adolescence reflecting evidence that children known pre-birth or in their first year are at highest risk of becoming looked-after. Strengthen multi-agency perinatal pathways including midwifery, health visiting, mental health and substance misuse services.
  • Create an Adolescent Risk and Resilience Hub that integrates police, youth offending, CAMHS and Education to reduce escalation among 10-17 year olds.
  • Expand evidence-based parenting and family-strengthening programmes to prevent abuse/neglect escalation.

Parental Support

  • Enhance domestic abuse and parental mental-health interventions, especially where household adversity predicts LAC entry.
  • Roll out specialist risk reduction programmes for parental substance misuse, mental ill-health and domestic abuse.
  • Strengthen adult-services alignment, particularly for mental illness, disability and substance misuse (known drivers of care entry).

Specialist Support

  • Increase specialist support for children with disabilities.
  • Commission specialist disability-aligned fostering and respite services to reduce requests for care triggered by unmet SEND needs.
  • Increase SEND early support hubs, enabling families to access help without escalation into social care.

Practice

  • Increase trauma-informed practice across social care, schools and early help teams, aligned with research showing neglect and emotional/sexual abuse substantially increase LAC risk.
  • Introduce a Family Help integrated model to streamline early intervention.
  • Create multi-agency panels for vulnerable families to prevent progression to child protection and care.
  • Introduce a Rapid Intervention Team capable of immediate assessment and intensive family preservation work to prevent emergency care entry (interim care orders).
  • Strengthen pre-proceedings practice ensuring timely engagement, family network mapping and legal gateway consistency.
  • Improve case auditing to understand why cases escalate to crisis instead of being stabilised earlier.

Strategic Issue 2

There is increasing reliance of private and voluntary-sector placements, a significant growth in high-need placement types and rising out-of-boundary and over 20 mile placements.

What needs to be done

Strategic Planning

  • Develop a Placement Sufficiency Strategy focusing on expanding LA-owned provision, particularly for adolescents and disabled children.
  • Introduce multi-agency placement stability panels to reduce breakdowns and increase LA-controlled placement planning.
  • Develop step-down pathways from residential to specialist foster care, reducing time spent in high-cost settings.
  • Create a local provider partnership forum to expand in-boundary capacity across sectors.
  • Improve data and forecasting to predict future placement needs by age/need type. Children experiencing abuse, neglect, or family disruption often escalate into residential care without early intervention.

Local Capacity

  • Invest in local residential capacity to reduce reliance on costly external and out-of-area placements. Out-of-area placements leads to reduced connection to family and community, variable quality oversight, weaker multi-agency coordination.
  • Commission therapeutic residential provision locally to manage trauma, risk-taking behaviour and complex needs without external placement drift.
  • Prioritise closer-to-home placement commissioning.

Fostering

  • Grow the local foster care market using enhanced fostering models. Increasing demand for high‑cost residential placements suggests rising complexity, insufficient foster capacity, or gaps in earlier-stage intervention.

Staff Training

  • Children with higher needs (complex trauma, disability) require skilled carers, stable placements and multi-agency support. Ensure staff are appropriately trained to manage children with higher needs.

Support

  • Strengthen CAMHS in residential partnerships, ensuring mental-health input into placement plans.
  • Implement adolescent edge of care teams to reduce residential admissions.

Strategic Issue 3

There are high levels of socioeconomic deprivation in Hartlepool.

What needs to be done

Embed social care within wider anti-poverty strategies ensuring children’s services are represented in housing, employment, welfare and financial-inclusion planning. Deliver targeted early-help outreach in the most deprived neighbourhoods, informed by poverty heat maps.

Scale programmes supporting families with financial strain (e.g. welfare advice within children’s centres, food/housing stability intervention). Socioeconomic and family‑stress factors are likely exerting sustained pressure on Hartlepool’s children’s social care pipeline, despite reduced overall CLA numbers, and require whole‑system early‑help investment.

Children’s Services and Public Health to develop a poverty-to-care prevention framework linking structural determinants to service responses, aligned with Health in All Policies.