Children’s Services

Debate between Robert Goodwill and Jo Platt

Tuesday 12th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Children and Families (Mr Robert Goodwill)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Peterborough (Fiona Onasanya) on securing this important debate. I was pleased to meet her briefly yesterday for the first time to discuss today’s topic, and I appreciated the passion and eloquence with which she argued her points, but although we may agree on the analysis of the problem, the solutions may not be as simple as she thinks.

I am sure we both agree that local authorities are tasked with providing some of our most important public services. Very clearly, we also agree that some of the most critical are the services that they provide to protect and support our most vulnerable children. That is a varied and complex responsibility, ranging from proactive and preventive early help to support children and families who are struggling to manage, to the critical end of the spectrum, as we have heard, where there is a real risk—a live risk—to young people, and where social workers are tasked with making tough decisions that protect lives and transform outcomes.

Right now, two thirds of our most vulnerable children live in local authorities where service provision is less than good. Although 89% of our schools are good or outstanding, only 36% of children’s services received the same rating. My Department works tenaciously to address that, but it is not an acceptable state of affairs. We are engaging with our colleagues in the Department for Communities and Local Government on the questions that the hon. Lady raises about funding, but we must be realistic. Quality is not only dependent on money. High-quality services need excellent leadership, a skilled and experienced workforce, and rigorous, evidence-based practice. Since I started this job six months ago, I have been impressed by how much of that good work is already out there and how much my Department has already done to spread it more widely.

Our reform agenda was set in 2016 and put into legislation earlier this year. The far-reaching suite of reforms set out a deeply ambitious approach to tackling the challenges within the system. It was intended not only to implement short-term interventions that would create better outcomes for children within the system now, but to lay the foundations for the future, ensuring that in years to come local authorities were equipped to deliver high-quality provision to future generations of vulnerable young people.

As part of that, over the past few years we have launched a major programme of reform to expand the numbers and quality of those entering social work. Frontline and Step Up are now well established entry-level schemes attracting high-performing graduates and older career changers into the profession, to bolster some of the excellent teams already out there. Meanwhile, the national assessment and accreditation system, due to launch in July, will raise the professional status of child and family social workers, providing a clear career path, as well as ensuring that these critical public servants have the knowledge and skills they need to practise effectively.

Our ambition is to create a truly evidence-based learning system for the sector, and the work is already well under way. This autumn, I was pleased to announce the two organisations that would establish the world’s first What Works centre for children’s social care. That vital piece of the reform jigsaw puzzle has now begun its incubation and I am excited that, not long from now, that fabulous resource will be used daily by policy makers, commissioners and practitioners, supporting them to make informed decisions, based on a rigorous catalogue of evidence that lets them know in an easy and accessible manner what interventions work.

That will be bolstered by the developing evidence from the children’s social care innovation programme, which since 2013 has injected £200 million into the sector to support nearly 100 innovative projects designed to improve outcomes for children across the country. The hon. Lady will know that her own constituency has benefited greatly from two such initiatives. Peterborough has received funding of up to £1.2 million over three years to support the commissioning of its fostering, adoption and permanency services to the Adolescent and Children’s Trust, a non-profit organisation committed to securing better and more permanent outcomes for all children and young people in care. Peterborough is also one of the four local authorities that is replicating the successful Hertfordshire innovation project. With funding from the first bidding round of the innovation programme, Hertfordshire has seen great results for children and their families with their family safeguarding model of social work. We are excited to see how the scale and spread of that model to Peterborough, Luton, Bracknell Forest and West Berkshire will replicate similar results for families in those areas.

[Jo Platt]

Does the Minister agree that what he is talking about is the higher end and most costly element of children’s services, which is our looked-after children and our children in care? What we need to do is to put that resource in at the earlier stages with children, before they go into crisis.

[Mr Goodwill]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. I visited the Pause programme in south London, which works with women who may become pregnant and have their children taken into care regularly, to break the cycle that makes life so difficult for them and, of course, for the children who have to be taken into care. It is an innovation that saves money. I was told that for every £1 invested in the programme in Greenwich, they save £5 in other interventions. Life is much better for those women. I met a number of women who had been involved in the project.

That is not to say that the system is delivering across the board or that we have achieved success in achieving our vision of a country where all children are protected from harm. There are still too many examples of young people and their families being let down by poor-quality services. My Department continues to take action to intervene where performance is not good enough.