Relational Practice in Changing Systems - Families First Reforms

A roundtable event to share hopes and learning for relational practice with teenagers in the landscape of the social care reforms.
About this Event

The Context

England's children's social care system is undergoing its most significant reform in a generation. Since April 2025, every local authority has been required to implement the Families First Partnership (FFP) Programme which is reshaping how families are supported and how child protection decisions are made, with a full implementation deadline of March 2027.

The reforms have largely been created for families with younger children where risk is intra-familial, where parental capacity and resources are the key variable, and where earlier support and family network involvement can change outcomes. The new Family Help Lead Practitioner (FHLP) role, multi-agency child protection teams (MACPTs), and the statutory rollout of Family Group Decision Making have been created with this in mind.

However for the children and young people that SHiFT primarily work with, there are additional considerations required to ensure that the social care reforms can be tailored to meet the needs of children and young people at risk of or involved in exploitation, criminal county lines, serious youth violence, child sexual exploitation, and the harms that bring them into contact with the youth justice system.

Some of the key dilemmas include:

• Harm outside the home and online harm safeguarding approaches where family support may be helpful but won’t necessarily tackle the causes of harm.
• Managing scenarios in which there is both harm inside the home and harm outside the home happening at the same time and refusing an either/or approach in practice.
• Harm happening across the geographic boundaries of the MACPT or the age boundary of statutory services.
• Workforce development and multi-agency working skills and spaces to bring out best practice.