Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether he has made a recent assessment of the potential merits of appointing (a) an independent Children’s Trust and (b) Commissioners to manage Tameside Children’s Services.

The safety and wellbeing of vulnerable children and young people remains a priority. The decision to intervene in a local authority is not taken lightly, and it is important to base that decision on robust evidence of failure. The department acts quickly and decisively to intervene in local authorities found to be failing in their delivery of children’s social care and judged inadequate by Ofsted.

In line with the department’s intervention policy set out in ‘Putting Children First’, whenever Ofsted finds children’s social care services to be inadequate, an adviser is provided to diagnose problems and support the council on their improvement journey. The government would expect most of those councils to improve with support and challenge from experts.

A commissioner is usually appointed, when council failure is systemic or has become persistent, to determine whether the council has the capacity and capability to improve children’s social care services in a reasonable timeframe. If not, services will be removed from council control for a period of time and transferred to a different organisation (usually a Trust) in order to secure sustainable improvement.

Tameside Children’s Services are currently rated as ‘requires improvement’. The department’s improvement programme seeks to identify and work collaboratively with local authorities who require targeted support to help them improve the services they provide to vulnerable children. The government has increased the amount of funded sector-led improvement activity that can be delivered from 2021 by expanding our cohort of strong performing local authorities to work as sector-led improvement partners.

‘Putting Children First’ is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/putting-children-first-our-vision-for-childrens-social-care.