Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what role the child protection task force has in preventing harm to children.

At the heart of the government’s agenda for all children is how to safeguard and protect children from harm. An important part of this is the work of the cross-government Ministerial taskforce on Child Protection.

The Child Protection Implementation Taskforce is taking a comprehensive approach to child protection through looking at the children social care system as a whole. Every stage of the child’s journey in the care system is important to safeguard and protect children. The Taskforce has looked at how we get the best people to deliver the right outcomes for allchildren– in particular through social work reform and improving leadership; through improving systems and practice – building a better performing, more innovative social care sector; and through accountability and governance, looking at how arrangements locally and nationally help to drive a strong and improving system. It is monitoring implementation and driving forward improvements and reform.

The Department for Education published a paper in January 2016 - ‘Children’s social care reform: a vision for change’ - which outlines the areas of reform the Taskforce has been looking at. This can be found on the gov.uk website at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/childrens-social-care-reform-a-vision-for-change