Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what process is in place to enable local authorities to adopt the best practice from the Children's Social Care Innovation Programme.

There is a comprehensive programme in place to share the learning from the Children’s Social Care Innovation Programme and to enable local authorities, including those not directly involved in the programme, to adopt and adapt the most successful innovations. This includes funding for successful projects from the first rounds of the programme to scale and spread into new areas and funding for some of the best local authorities (the Partners in Practice) to support other improving local authorities to adopt and adapt successful projects.

In addition, there is an ongoing programme of local, regional and national events, workshops and seminars, attended to date by over 1200 people. There is a growing package of toolkits, case studies and learning guides available through the Innovation Programme website to help authorities understand and mobilise innovations.

The learning and evidence from the Innovation programme is also informing the new What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care, which will build a library of high quality evidence in children’s social care and ensure that it is widely used.