Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what the cost has been of setting up the What Works Centre to date.
In October 2017, 2 contracts were awarded by Department for Education to establish the What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care. A consortium led by NESTA was awarded the contract for an ‘incubator’ and Cardiff University was awarded the ‘research partner’ role. The contracts have a total value of £9.8 million and will run until March 2020.
In November 2018 the research partner’s contract was extended by up to £2.4 million in order to support the implementation of a number of projects in 6 local authorities. This money is exclusively for those local authorities to implement and manage the projects with the management costs for Cardiff absorbed into their existing contract.