Looked After Children JSNA

Strategic Issue 1

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.

Why

• Although the total number of LAC in Hartlepool has decreased between 2021 and 2025, several risk-intensive cohorts have increased: Under 1s has increase since 2021 and is above national and regional levels. UK research shows infants — especially those known to social care pre‑birth or in their first year — have the highest risk of becoming looked‑after.
• Children aged 10–15 (46%) – significantly increased and above both the North East and England.
• 16+ group (20%) – increased since 2021.
• Abuse- and disability-related need: Abuse or neglect (N1): 73%, which is higher than NE (69%) and England (67%).
• Child’s disability (8%), much higher than NE (1%) and England (2%).
• Parental illness/disability (4%), also above NE (1%) and England (2%).
• Academic evidence shows abuse, neglect, disability, household mental ill‑health, and other vulnerabilities sharply increase the likelihood of entering care.
• Rising interim orders suggest that children are entering care in more urgent, acute circumstances requiring rapid intensive intervention. Interim care orders increased to 20% which is higher than the North East and England. Full care orders have decreased. This implies that more cases are entering the system at crisis point / there are delays or challenges in progressing permanence planning / there is increased pressure on courts and legal services.
• The high proportion of abuse/neglect cases combined with adolescent spike suggests unmet early help needs.

Strategic Issue 2

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.

Why

• Data shows the private placement provision has risen to 27% (increasing since 2021), voluntary sector placements increased to 9% and own LA provision has fallen, though is still above national levels.
• There has been an increase in high-need placement types, children’s homes and secure placements has increased and is above the North East and England. Supported accommodation / independent living has increased.
• There is an increase in out-of-boundary and over 20-mile placements. 45% are placed outside the LA boundary (higher than the North East and England), 13% are placed over 20-miles from home which has increased since 2021.

Strategic Issue 3

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.

Why

Socioeconomic vulnerability effects local care entry. National evidence shows that Children in the most deprived 10% of neighbourhoods are 10× more likely to enter care, a 1% rise in child poverty causes 5 additional children per 100,000 to enter care.