Question to the Department for Education:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of Achieving for Children, a community interest company created in 2014 by the Royal Borough of Kingston and the London Borough of Richmond to provide their children’s services; and whether they plan to promote this model for use by other local authorities.

Achieving for Children was jointly established in 2014 by the local authorities (LAs) of Kingston and Richmond and has since been joined by Windsor & Maidenhead in 2017 as a third partner. Since joining the Trust, Richmond have maintained their Good Ofsted judgement (2022) and Kingston are now rated Outstanding (2019), an excellent improvement from their previous Inadequate judgement (2013). Ofsted viewed Achieving for Children’s leadership as strong, which was highlighted in Kingston’s latest focused visit (May 2022).

For those LAs who are not failing in their delivery of children’s social care (CSC) services, it is a decision for the leadership team as to whether they would like to voluntarily create or join a trust. The department does not specifically promote the community interest company model being used in this space as any decision on this would sit with the LA and be dependent on their own local context and needs. If, however, a LA is found to be persistently or systemically failing by Ofsted then the department will follow its intervention protocol and appoint a commissioner to assess whether services should be removed from the council. One possible outcome of this assessment is the recommendation that a trust be set up to manage services on the LAs behalf.

There are currently nine Children’s Services Trusts in operation across England. Achieving for Children is different to the other eight in that it was not set up in response to a failure in CSC service delivery. The other eight Trusts are in Bradford, Birmingham, Northamptonshire (covering North and West), Reading, Sandwell, Slough, Sunderland and Worcestershire.

The introduction of Children’s Services Trusts has worked well in helping failing LAs turn their services around such as in Birmingham which has improved to Good and in Sunderland where services went from ‘Inadequate’ to ‘Outstanding’ in a single inspection cycle.