Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of provision of social workers in schools with a high volume of cases requiring social worker support.

Local authority social workers provide statutory support for children in need of help and protection. The department does not hold data on the proportion of the 29,470 full-time equivalent local authority social workers in England who are working in schools as most social workers will hold cases for children who are attending several different schools. Where additional support is provided within school, it is for headteachers to decide how to spend their budget to best meet the needs of their pupils; some choose to employ trained social workers as part of their pastoral support provision.

Analysis from the June 2019 Children in Need review shows that of all state schools in England in 2017-18: only 2% of schools (499) do not have a single pupil to have been in need of a social worker since 2012-13; in almost a third of schools these children make up between 5-10% of the pupil population; in 12% of schools, over 20% of the pupil population were at some point in need of a social worker.

As part of a What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care (WWC) Change Programme focussed on moving services closer to children and families, £2.4 million funding was made available in 2019-20 for local authorities and children’s services trusts to test social workers being based in schools. The WWC is working with 3 local authorities -- Lambeth, Southampton and Stockport -- to set up and evaluate new ways of working in which social workers work in schools to prevent harm to children and deal more effectively with harm where it occurs. The evaluation of the programme will begin in Spring 2019 and run until March 2020, when a final report will be published.

In addition, 2 Opportunity Areas - Stoke and Hastings - are testing the effectiveness of models which embed social workers in schools. In the recently published ‘Help, Protection, Education: concluding the Children in Need review’, the department committed to learn from and consider how to build on the evidence from these trials.