Make It Local: Improving life chances for all children

Government can ensure all children and young people fulfil their potential and lead fulfilling lives by enabling councils to deliver joined up local support.

Evidence shows that where children are safe, healthy, happy and receive a good education, they are more likely to go on to successful adulthoods in which they  contribute to society and require far less support from public services. However, current support and services for children and families is fragmented between different parts of government and the crucial role of councils to promote the wellbeing of all children is too often overlooked. To improve the system government must:

• give councils the powers and funding to effectively lead local SEND systems, including powers to hold all mainstream schools to account for their work to increase levels of inclusion
• fully trial Work Local, co-design an employment and skills devolution framework, and work with local government to plan provision 
• make a cross-Whitehall commitment to children – ensuring that every department plays its part in creating good childhoods
• prioritise children’s health and mental health through investing in early intervention and prevention
• ensure councils have the skills, resources and tools available to effectively support providers and partners to deliver high quality early years education and childcare.

Over half a million children recently told the Children’s Commissioner that they wanted a good home life, a good education, a job, enough money, friends, to feel well and to be treated fairly, and to look after the environment. As the Children’s Commissioner put it - “to do well and create a better world.” And the evidence suggests that many of these things are what make for a good childhood and better life chances. Our job in government – both local and national – is to create the foundations for all children to have those things. For some children that will mean big interventions, for others we’ll need to provide some support, but for many, it simply means that we create great places to grow up.

Councils see improving outcomes for children as a priority and are looking carefully at the impact of wider economic and social policy on future life chances. Devolving more powers from national to local government would give councils greater flexibility to design joined-up local services to meet the needs of children and families.

A council-led, child-centred approach is needed to ensure that all children and young people are equipped and supported to live healthy and fulfilling lives and grow up to contribute to growing local economies and community well-being.

National government will rightly want to set expectations as to the support and education that all children and young people are entitled to. But it is only councils that have the knowledge and expertise needed to ensure that national aspirations are delivered in a way that best meets the needs of local communities.

Councils have duties to meet the needs of children and young people, as well as wider duties around local economies and the well-being of communities. Certainty of funding has ended and has also failed to keep pace with need. In some instances the systems that councils have responsibility for have fragmented, for example schools. There are now a number of actors all working to meet the needs of children and young people, but without a shared vision of how that should be achieved. 

Creating places that truly support and protect children and young people takes time and is never “done”; children’s needs change constantly, while new opportunities and new threats arise frequently. However, by considering children’s needs in all policy making; ensuring a well-trained workforce supported by the right resources; and ensuring government and our partners are working to the same ambitions, we can respond quickly to change and give children what they need to lead safe, happy and healthy lives that set them up for successful adulthood.

We need to move away from the fragmentation of local children’s services, education and skills provision and ensure that councils have the powers, funding and commitment from partners to ensure they can support all children and young people to lead fulfilling lives.

Early years

Wider reform is needed to ensure a sustainable and affordable early years childcare and education system that works for all families and carers.  Recent announcements on early years education and childcare risk being undermined by the underfunding of early years provision, exacerbated by the rising cost of living and inflationary pressures and an overly complex system for councils, providers and families.

To be able to deliver on the new announcements, councils’ early years teams need:

• Greater tools, resources and investment to be able to support early years childcare providers, carry out vital improvement work and provide direct support for parents and families.
• The government to prioritise children with early years SEND needs - early years education and childcare services need to work closely with and be supported by other partners, such as health visitors and family support workers. Children’s centres, such as Sure Start centres and Family Hubs, show the positive impact that early intervention can have and how effective multi-disciplinary working can be in making long term improvements to all children’s outcomes.

Child health

The health visiting service plays a crucial role in giving children the best start in life. Health visitors provide expert information and support to families, developing relationships that enable difficulties to be identified early and help offered when needed. Councils and school nurses have developed strong partnerships to coordinate and deliver public health interventions for school-aged children. This work includes providing healthy lifestyles advice, support for emotional health and other vital early intervention work.

However, public health teams have faced an unprecedented period of funding and demand pressures, and the public health nursing workforce has decreased by over a third since 2015. Councils need:

• sufficient ongoing funding to ensure all councils can continue to meet their statutory public health responsibilities.
• an increased focus on prevention through an uplift to the public health grant
• a fully resourced, integrated workforce plan that underpins the current refresh of the Healthy Child Programme.

Children’s social care

As the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care identified, support for families must be responsive to local need and rooted in communities to make sure that families not only get the help they need, when they need it, but know that help is there and feel comfortable accessing it before problems get worse. And where more intensive support is needed, including bringing children into care, this works better where local help is available and where social workers and others are from local communities, understanding local contexts.

Councils need:

• sufficient funding, as well as commitment from their partners, to invest in the services that we know work for families, whether that is through universal services or as part of a child protection plan
• to be able to fund the right homes for children in care, whether that is foster care or a children’s home, and provide the wraparound support those children need
• the pay and support for its workforce that reflects the vital role they play in supporting children to live safe and happy childhoods.

Mental health

NHS figures show that one in six children aged seven to 16 have a mental health disorder, and this is even higher for 17 to 19-year-olds, at one in four. Half of all mental health problems are established by the age of 14 so it is essential that we intervene early.

Rising mental health needs among children and young people are having a significant impact on social care services, with a record number of children with mental health problems seen by social workers in 2022, up more than half since 2018 to 87,750.



Mental health is interwoven with other agendas – including poverty, housing, education, public health, social care, employment, social inclusion, economic development, and safety. Councils are uniquely placed to connect all parts of the system. With an ability to bridge between voluntary and community sector and health service partners, councils can, if resourced and with sufficient staffing, trigger a sea-change in the effectiveness of collaboration between different agencies. .

More effective collaboration needs:

•  A cross Whitehall strategy that puts the needs of children and young people at its centre. This will support the wider system to work collaboratively towards clear roles with identified outputs and outcomes, including drawing together the direction from this mental health plan.
• The roll out of mental health support teams in schools should be central to this strategy, alongside investment in community mental health support, including youth services, for children who cannot access school-based mental health provision.

Education

Councils and councillors know that a good education is key to improving the life chances of children and young people and as champions of school autonomy in a fragmented school system made up of maintained schools, free schools and academies, play a key role in supporting school improvement and holding schools to account for their performance, with 92 per cent of maintained schools rated by Ofsted as outstanding or good – a higher proportion than any other type of school. Councils do not however have sufficient powers to support all children, young people and schools in their areas. Councils need:

• Powers to direct all schools, including academies, to admit pupils that are out-of-school and make sure they are back in the classroom as quickly as possible. The introduction of a register for electively home educated children (EHE) is needed alongside powers for councils to meet face-to-face with home educated children. This measure is vital to allow councils to verify that children are receiving a suitable education in a safe environment.
• To be able to utilise the strong council record in school improvement by allowing councils to support ‘orphan’ schools where Department for Education Regional Directors are struggling to find a strong Multi-Academy Trust to take them on. Councils’ work in school improvement is vital and the Local Authority Monitoring and Brokering (LAMB) grant should be re-introduced to support and enhance this work.

Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND)

The existing SEND system does not meet the needs of many children and young people with SEND and needs urgent reform. Councils are ideally placed to act as convenors of local SEND systems but need certainty of funding and levers to fulfil this role effectively. Reforms should focus on three broad themes:

• structures, including clarity on responsibility for councils, health and education for delivering SEND support to children and young people
• levers, specifically ensuring that councils, as leaders of local SEND systems, have the powers to hold partners to account for the work
• sufficiency of funding to meet the needs of children with SEND.

Testing, refining and implementing any reforms will take a number of years, and in the meantime plans must be developed that manage down and eliminate council Dedicated Schools Grant deficits.

Jobs and skills

All young people deserve access to good, joined up training, employment and careers services.

But our analysis reveals that the system to achieve this is fragmented, centralised, and short-term with £20 billion spent on at least 49 national employment and skills related schemes or services. As no single national or local organisation coordinates or is accountable for how the totality are improving outcomes, it's hard to plan pathways for young people, reskill residents for an ever-changing jobs market or knit services together for the unemployed. Local leaders work hard to join services up, but want to do more. The LGA's Work Local aims to enhance national government’s efforts to work with all local leaders to design local jobs and skills offers.

With devolved responsibility and funding, local leaders could, alongside their role to drive economic growth, work with partners to create ‘one stop’ local skills and employment services, connected to wider services, partners and support, including helping young people decide their next move after school. Work Local has the potential to increase by 15 percent the number of people improving skills or finding work at lower cost. For a medium-sized combined authority, this could mean a further 2,260 people improving their skills and 1,650 people moving into work.  

To make this happen, national government should co-design with us a devolution framework, fully trial Work Local in places underpinned by multi-year devolved employment and skills outcome agreements (DESAs) and work with the sector to plan provision and share data, so it benefits all areas, not just those with devolution.

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