Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to improve funding and support for child social care.

The Department for Education recognises the need to continue to improve funding and support for children’s social care, supporting local authorities to improve the provision of their services and get better value for money. Although local authorities are responsible for the vast majority of the expenditure in children’s social services, the Department’s investment and support has been focused across four key areas: innovation; direct support to underperforming authorities; improvements to the social work force; and leadership. There are also a number of areas of specific support, such as the Department’s response to adoption, child sexual exploitation, and children in care.

The Children’s Social Care Innovation Programme has allocated an additional £100 million funding for 2014-15 and 2015-16, targeted at supporting vulnerable children and those on the edge of care. The programme was launched in order to enable local authorities, charities, social enterprises and private organisations to test new methods of delivery in order to achieve higher quality and better value for money. The programme covers 50 projects and involves 72 local authorities. The Department will be working closely with all projects to support implementation and build a strong evidence base. Further information can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/childrens-services-innovation-programme

The Department regularly intervenes to provide effective support to local authorities which are failing to provide safe children’s social care services. We have recently strengthened underperforming authorities by appointing six experts in children’s social care to support them.

With regard to strengthening the social work workforce, by the end of the current Parliament, the Department will have invested more than £680 million in social work training and improvement, mostly in bursaries to social work students. We are also committed to improving the quality of social worker recruitment through the Frontline and Step Up to Social Work entry training programmes for high calibre recruits.

With regard to leadership, the Department is committed to strengthening the quality of those in positions of leadership. The Department has funded the Virtual Staff College with over £8.4 million since 2012-13 in order to provide leadership development for Directors of Children’s Services and Assistant Directors.

We are taking action to build capacity and expertise in local areas in order to respond to recent reports exposing the level of child sexual abuse and exploitation. The Government responded to the Rotherham reports by announcing a range of action to improve accountability and target prevention. Further information can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/tackling-child-sexual-exploitation--2