Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent progress she has made on implementing the children's social care national framework and dashboard.

The Children’s Social Care National Framework (National Framework), along with proposed Children’s Social Care Dashboard (Dashboard) indicators, were published for consultation at the same time as the government’s strategy for children’s social care, ‘Stable Homes, Built on Love’, in February 2023. The National Framework describes the outcomes that children’s social care should achieve when supporting children, young people and families. The Dashboard will serve as a learning tool for local and central government. It will have a national set of indicators, to help understand progress towards the children’s social care outcomes, and to support learning and improvement at a local, regional, and national level.

The consultation took place over 14 weeks and gathered a range of views from the online consultation and over 30 engagement events that involved around 500 people from local authorities, education, health, and police, as well as members of the public. The government response to the consultation was published in September 2023 and committed to iterating the National Framework, giving more prominence to the important role of practice supervisors, as well as adding a new chapter on how multi-agency working enables good outcomes.

The National Framework will be issued as statutory guidance by the end of the year. Local authorities will have a one-year implementation period, and government has committed to provide advice to local authorities on embedding the National Framework. A phased roll-out of the Dashboard will begin in 2024 so that the department can test, evaluate and iterate the Dashboard.