Children's commissioner and former multi-academy trust CEO Dame Rachel de Souza says that over the years she has come to the conclusion one institution is more transformational for children than a school.

Families have an influence that extends throughout a child's life, she believes. Speaking at the National Children and Adult Services Conference in Manchester earlier this month, she says her Big Ask survey – ‘the largest of its kind, with over half a million children responding' – sent back the message that she needed to focus on families. She says children of all backgrounds spoke about the importance of families to them.

Commissioned by Government to undertake the Independent Family Review, she says she set about understanding the ‘nuts and bolts of family life in the UK in 2022', travelling the country to talk to all types of families.

Calling family ‘dynamic', she highlights that 44% of children will not live with both their birth parents for their whole childhood. So any understanding of families needs to include ‘blended families, separated families, adoptive families and children who are cared for by foster carers, kinship carers, and in children's homes'.

Quality of relationships rather than the form of families is what matters most, she believes. And she says her commission's research translated that into ‘hard and fast evidence'. Children who reported a close relationship with their parents at age 13 had higher earnings at age 25.

For the most part ‘parents and wider family love their children and want to do their best for them', but they can be overwhelmed, she points out. And when these problems become too great for families to deal with alone they need to turn to services. When that happens she wants ‘the services to be there to meet them, and to support them like a family would – without judgement, with love, and for the long term'.

As a result of this, she emphasises that part two of her Family Review will concentrate on delivering services ‘designed around children and families, not ‘service users'. She wants to see services that understand the family in the round, ‘so that if an adult is facing difficulties with mental health, finances, or other issues, the impact on the child is considered and support provided'. Families have told her they want services that are ‘local, available when they need them, and utterly reliable – just like the strongest families are'.

Announcing her intention to set out practical solutions to address some of the ‘perennial barriers that services face', she says these will include a shared outcomes framework, improved data sharing and increased local integration.

She is also looking closely at the way many local statutory bodies work together, ‘to better understand how and where responsibility for supporting families should sit'.

There is a ‘real opportunity to be grasped at this moment, as reforms are being considered across the system', she believes. She mentions that, with the Government soon to respond to the Independent Review of Children's Social Care, a Green Paper on supporting children with special educational needs and disabilities and the introduction of Integrated Care Systems, ‘now is the time to finally make sure that health, education and social care stop pulling in different directions and start pulling together'.

But she highlights the most serious and pressing issue facing her team, and children's services' teams, is the lack of places for children in care to live. She says the lack of ‘decent, loving homes' for children in care needs to be tackled as a national priority, and that ‘this cannot wait, children cannot wait'.

Many in the sector, including president of the Association of Directors of Children's Services Steve Crocker, have spoken out against the profit motive in children's social care placements, with Mr Crocker calling in The MJ for the Government to signal either an end to profit, reduced profits or a cap. Dame Rachel says the private sector can have a role to play, ‘as long as the standards are the highest'. They should be part of a picture completed with local authority and voluntary sector provision, and it is that which is increasingly shrinking from the market, she believes.

National intervention is needed to support the children with the most needs, and she wants to see services located as locally as possible, unless it is not in their best interests, or not what the child wants.

She says she has been making the case within Government for local authorities to receive support with that investment.

Dame Rachel mentions the murdered children Star Hobson and Arthur Labinjo-Hughes saying that they ‘weigh heavily on my mind, as I know they do on yours'. She says new names, of the three privately-run residential special schools Fullerton House, Wilsic Hall and Wheatley House in Doncaster, are added to that list.

She concludes that these are a reminder that the reform we need to see is urgent – ‘that there are children at risk as we meet here today, who cannot wait'.