The UK Government has confirmed five new Regional Care Co-operatives (RCCs), bringing the total to seven and extending the new model of children's social care to more than 100 local authorities across England. 

RCCs are partnerships operating across multiple local authority areas to deliver better outcomes for children in care. 

The new RCCs will cover London, the North East, East Midlands, West Midlands, and Cheshire and Merseyside, the Department for Education announced yesterday. 

Four new Fostering Hubs will also go live before the end of the year, a consultation has launched on new simplified fostering standards, and the Room Makers programme is being extended to all hubs and RCCs to help foster carers expand their homes. 

Applications have also opened for the £23.1m Home Again programme, which will fund up to five RCCs and their partners to provide children with the most complex needs – those at risk of being deprived of their liberty – with a single, co-ordinated plan drawing together social care, health, education and youth justice.

James Arrowsmith, Partner in social care at UK and Ireland law firm Browne Jacobson, said: “This package should be understood first and foremost as a significant programme of system improvement – one that reflects both the urgency of the challenges facing children's social care and the government's commitment to a sustained, long-term reform agenda.

“The decision to reframe fostering standards around quality and relationships, rather than minimum compliance requirements, is both welcome and overdue. As the expectations placed on foster carers have grown, it is right that the framework they operate within keeps pace. The emphasis on enduring, loving relationships as the organising principle for the standards reflects a maturing understanding of what children in care actually need – not bureaucratic process, but stability, trust and belonging.

“From our experience of working on the RCC programme via the pathfinder projects, we believe this model has real potential to shift the dynamic in local children's care markets, giving local authorities the collective influence they have lacked as individual commissioners. 

“The foundations these organisations are built on matter enormously – a shared vision across member authorities, governance structures that are fit for purpose from the outset, and the organisational flexibility to develop and adapt as learning accumulates at both local and national level. The ambition is right, but the quality of implementation will determine whether it is realised.

“The Home Again programme addresses what is arguably the most intractable challenge in the current system – children whose needs are so acute, and whose situation so complex, that the system has too often responded by attempting to contain rather than genuinely support them. 

“The aspiration to bring social care, health, education and justice together around a single tailored plan for each child is exactly the right instinct. The harder question, and the one that will determine whether this initiative makes a lasting difference, is whether system partners can be brought together in a genuinely collaborative way, rather than simply co-ordinated on paper. 

“Our work across health and care on deprivation of liberty makes clear just how high the stakes are for these young people, and how important it is that this cross-system ambition translates into real, day-to-day practice.

“This is a substantial and serious package of reform. The direction of travel is right, and the government deserves credit for the ambition it reflects. The work of making it real now begins.”