Children: Social Services

(asked on 16th January 2018) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what policies his Department has developed as a result of inspection findings under the Single Inspection Framework for local authority children's services.


Answered by
Nadhim Zahawi Portrait
Nadhim Zahawi
This question was answered on 19th January 2018

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:

  • setting up the ‘What Works Centre’ for Children’s Social Care, which will give us robust evidence on how to improve the lives of vulnerable children;
  • placing a new duty on local authorities, police and health services to work together to safeguard and promote children’s welfare;
  • working with some of the best local authorities in the country to model and disseminate excellent practice through the system, with £20 million going to Councils to get ahead of failure;
  • launching the ‘alpha’ phase of the National Assessment and Accreditation System (NAAS) of children and family social workers; and
  • the extension of the Partners in Practice programme to help improve sector performance.

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.

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