Poverty and children entering care in England: A qualitative study of local authority policymakers’ perspectives of challenges in Children’s Services

Tackling the unsustainable rise in children in care is a policy priority in England. There is growing evidence that adverse socioeconomic circumstances are an important driver of children entering care. Less is known about the place of these drivers on the Children's Services policy agenda. Our aim in this study was to elicit local authority policymakers' understanding of the challenges in Children's Services over the past decade and assess how the problem of poverty is framed. We conducted remote, individual, semi-structured interviews with 15 policymakers across six local authority Children's Services departments in England. Purposive sampling guided recruitment of local authorities with outlying trends in care entry after accounting for deprivation and unemployment trends. Within local authorities, snowball sampling was used to reach relevant policymakers. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and thematically coded. In this study, we focus the analysis on policymakers' consideration of poverty and deprivation. We identified six key themes. For some participants, the concept of stress was key to explaining the troubling connection between poverty and care. They seemed to describe a 'latent family stress model' for the relationship, consciously or intuitively favouring a particular pre-existing explanatory model (theme 1). But many participants also exhibited 'causal aversion' when explaining the relationship, avoiding causal language. Hesitation, clarification, and caveat betrayed a general anxiety about stigmatising poverty and flattening complexity (theme 2). Participants appeared more comfortable describing the harmful impact of clusters of more proximal, behavioural risk factors. Amidst these risk clusters, poverty was easily 'lost in the mix' (theme 3). This is in contrast to the prominent place of deprivation in participants' between-local authority comparisons. In these 'assured comparisons', deprivation was more of an explanation than a target for intervention (theme 4). Few participants proposed concrete policies to address adverse socioeconomic circumstances – but some did, 'imagining solutions' that attend to families' material realities (theme 5). The framing of these solutions suggests that 'anti-poverty policy entrepreneurs' may be gaining some traction in the local policy arena (theme 6). Our findings reveal obstacles to addressing the socioeconomic drivers of care entry: a problem that cannot readily be named, does not reach the policy agenda. When attempting to frame the problem and raise the status of these drivers on the local policy agenda, current and prospective policy entrepreneurs may wish to harness policymakers' ready grasp of the harms of financial stress while offering clear conceptual models and causal language for breaking the poverty-to-care taboo – without downplaying real-world complexity. They should continue to highlight the potential role of local anti-poverty policies in safely reducing care entry.