Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what progress the Government has made in implementing the finding and recommendations of Putting Children First: Delivering our vision for excellent children's social care; and how the Government monitors that progress.
In 2016, the Department for Education (DfE) set out its plans for Children’s Social Care reform in the policy paper ‘Putting Children First’, which can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/putting-children-first-our-vision-for-childrens-social-care. This paper set out the challenges faced by the children’s social care system, including those around training, management, and lack of innovation.
Our reforms were influenced by the evidence on what works to improve children’s social care services including findings from the tougher more practice-focused Ofsted inspection framework that we introduced in 2013. We have developed this further and introduced the new Inspection of Local Authority Children’s Services (ILACS) framework this month to drive further improvement in children’s services.
Since 2010, spending on the most vulnerable children has increased by over half a billion in real terms and 37 authorities have been lifted out of intervention and have not returned.
We are making further progress in delivering our ambitious reform programme through:
In response to the recent Public Accounts Committee and National Audit Office report, the department published the ‘CSC public roadmap’ for how it intends to transform services. This can be found here: http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/public-accounts/Correspondence/2017-19/Correspondence-dfe-Child-Protection-180917.pdf) and sets out a timeframe for delivery of the reforms.