Children: Protection

(asked on 21st March 2017) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, on how many occasions officials in her Department supported local authorities in assessing children's needs in families who are seeking Section 17 of the Children Act 1989 in 2016.


Answered by
Edward Timpson Portrait
Edward Timpson
This question was answered on 27th March 2017

Our statutory guidance, Working Together to Safeguard Children (2015), is clear that where a local authority undertakes an assessment under section 17 of the Children Act 1989 such an assessment will be carried out by a social worker.

Department for Education (DfE) officials take up a range of secondment opportunities, including in some instances to local authority children’s services, as part of gaining experience of frontline services to aid the development of better policy. However, DfE has not seconded any staff to local authorities in order to support the assessment of children’s needs under section 17 and the Department does not anticipate that any DfE officials would be directly involved in supporting such assessments.

Department officials do support local authorities to deliver improvements to children’s social care services. Such support may be provided in order to respond to inadequate performance in local areas or to help develop and deliver innovative new approaches to delivering such services.

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