New statutory guidance means children in care, children in need and care leavers should now be offered an advocate without having to ask, and not only when they want to complain. In my latest piece for Children and Young People Now I set out what has changed. The guidance replaces Get it Sorted, which since […]
James Anderson
Changes to regulated activity with children from 1 September 2026
The Charity Commission updated its safeguarding guidance for trustees on 8 October 2026. The biggest change for charities working with children is that the supervision exemption has gone. Since 1 September 2026, anyone who teaches, trains, instructs, cares for or supervises children more than three days in any 30, or overnight, is in regulated activity […]
Ofsted’s changes to inspecting children’s services
Ofsted removed the overall effectiveness judgement from inspections of local authority children’s services from 1 April 2026. Four judgements remain: help and protection, children in care, care leavers, and the impact of leaders. How often an authority is inspected now depends on those four. Ofsted has also consulted, until 28 September 2026, on a renewed […]
This month marks a milestone you will almost certainly not have seen reported.
Twenty years ago the regulations behind the statutory children’s social care complaints procedure came into force, and the guidance beneath them has not been revised since. Few people outside children’s services know the procedure exists, and fewer still know what it gives a child, the right to have someone independent read the records and say […]
Complaints are just a waste of everyone’s time, and what the statutory framework says about that
For most of the twentieth century a child in the care of the state in England had no route to challenge how they were treated. Parents whose children were removed had little more. The Short Report in 1984 described a care system children disappeared into with almost no independent scrutiny of the decisions made about […]
Learning from repeating themes in social care complaint investigations
Three months after a decision is made, I often cannot tell whether it was a good one, and neither can a complaints panel. Most upheld complaints come down to that. I have written for Children and Young People Now about the patterns that repeat across statutory social care complaint investigations, and what services should do […]
What happens when a complaint reaches stage 2
The piece is on what happens when a complaint reaches stage 2 and an independent investigator gets involved. After more than 75 stage 2 investigations across more than 15 local authorities, the patterns are consistent, and they are not always what practitioners expect. The decision itself is usually defensible, and people are let down by […]
What good governance actually looks like when it matters
Most charities have a safeguarding policy. The harder part is what happens when a situation is moving quickly, people are under pressure and nobody is sure who needs to know, what should be recorded or when trustees should step in. In my guest blog for VONNE, the North East’s voluntary sector network, I look at […]
Why going independent was the best professional decision I ever made
Going independent was the best professional decision I ever made. I learned a huge amount working inside organisations. At a certain point I realised the most valuable things I could offer were judgment, specialist knowledge and the freedom to be independent, and none of them was tied to one employer. I wrote about it for […]
Complaints must be part of the Child Protection Authority
Resolution Ready has submitted a response to the Department for Education’s consultation on the proposed Child Protection Authority for England. Our response focuses on a gap we see consistently in practice: statutory children’s social care complaints are not yet recognised as a source of national learning, and they should be. Complaints are a formal mechanism […]