Rebalancing children's services spending: what the latest data tells us

Children’s services are an essential support system for children and families, providing universal provision, targeted support to those who need extra help, protecting children in need or at risk, and looking after children who aren't able to stay safely at home.

But, over the past 15 years, children’s services spending has become increasingly imbalanced - away from early intervention and towards crisis.

Our new report on children’s services spending in England shows what this means in practice. The analysis, carried out by PBE on behalf of five leading children’s charities including Action for Children, shows that in 2024/25, local authorities in England spent nearly £15 billion on children’s services, a record amount.

Taken by itself, rising spending might sound like good news.

Action for Children has long called for immediate and sustained investment in children’s services. This would be a price worth paying if higher spending meant better experiences for children and families. But, outcomes for children in care across a range of measures – including education, wellbeing, health and future employment – remain far below the national average, and have not significantly improved as spending has increased.

Care can be the best and safest place for a child, and many children receive lifechanging, high-quality support from dedicated professionals and carers. However, the system as a whole is not delivering the stability, support and opportunity that every child needs.

Behind the headline figure is a more complicated story. What we’re seeing in this data is the result of a deeply unbalanced system. 

Over the past decade and a half, spending has shifted away from early intervention services - including family support, children’s centres, youth services, parenting programmes and community-based help – and towards late intervention, including social care, child protection and youth justice. In 2010/11, 62% of children’s services spending was on late intervention; by 2024/25, this had risen to 82%.

At the same time, early intervention spending remains much lower than it was in 2010/11. Despite some small rises since the pandemic, the overall picture is a reduction of 40% between 2011 and 2025.

The rise in spending since 2010 does not necessarily mean an increase in earlier or more effective support. Instead, it reflects three combined pressures facing children’s social care:

• Rising numbers of children requiring care. The number of children in care has increased by 25% since 2011, reaching around 82,000 in March 2025. This is much higher than the 7% increase in the population of children in England in the same period.
• Children entering care with more complex care needs. The age and needs of children in care have changed significantly. While the number of children under five entering care has fallen since 2011, the number of children aged 16 and over has risen by over 250%. Older children are more likely to have experienced trauma, violence and extra-familial harm such as exploitation, and have mental health or other complex needs which require specialist support.
• Soaring costs of care placements. The average local authority expenditure for a child in care is now over £100,000 a year, an increase of 30% since 2020.

The changing age profile of children entering care reinforces the need for support across the whole of childhood.

Older children and their families often fall between systems: too old for the family-based support offered in the early years, but too young for youth services provision designed for young adults. Families can be left navigating school absence, SEND, mental health needs, extra-familial harm, violence at home or police involvement without a clear route to help.

This is the false economy of cutting early and universal support. Money may be saved in the short term, but problems do not disappear. Families are left without help until their needs become more complex, more entrenched and more expensive to respond to. The costs shown in this data are financial, but they are also acutely felt in the lives and experiences of children and families. Rebalancing children’s services means increasing support across the whole of childhood including for adolescents, their parents and carers.

The analysis in our report comes at an important moment. The government has made significant commitments to reform and invest in children's services, including through Families First, the rollout of Best Start in Life and family hubs, SEND reform and wider changes to social care. Underpinning these changes is a welcome ambition to rebalance the system towards earlier help for children and families.

To know whether this reform is working over the coming months and years, we need to understand the starting point. The data in our report gives us a snapshot of the system before recent spending commitments have started to take effect. It shows the scale of the challenge the government is trying to address, and will help us to assess whether new funding changes the shape of the system over time.

The test now is whether that investment does deliver the shift needed towards earlier help, and whether it is sustained for long enough to rebalance the system.

Over the coming year, we will be looking for evidence that early help spending is embedded and sustainable; that more families are getting support before they reach crisis; that support is available across the whole of childhood; that care placements are stable and suitable for every child; and that outcomes for children and families are improving.

The government has taken significant first steps to break the cycle of crisis-driven spending. We will be watching closely and optimistically to see whether the government’s investment drives the change that children and families need.