Children in Care: Coronavirus

(asked on 20th May 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what additional support is being allocated to councils to support children in the care system during the covid-19 lockdown.


Answered by
Vicky Ford Portrait
Vicky Ford
This question was answered on 2nd June 2020

The government has provided over £3.2 billion of additional funding to support local authorities (LAs) in meeting COVID-19 related pressures, including within children’s social care.

Our latest guidance on children in care is set out below:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/coronavirus-covid-19-guidance-for-schools-and-other-educational-settings. We will keep this under very close review over the coming weeks and months to understand pressures and issues as they arise.

We have also committed over £100 million to support access to social care services and remote education, including by providing laptops, tablets and 4G wireless routers to children with a social worker who do not have access to the internet. Further, we have committed additional funding worth £26.4 million directly to charities to support vulnerable and disadvantaged children and £1.6 million to expand the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children’s helpline.

In order to ensure engagement with all children and to support effective risk assessment, through emergency legislation and with Social Work England, we have reinstated the professional registration of 8,000 former social workers so that they can re-join the profession, providing additional resource where it is required.

LAs have a statutory duty to ensure that there is sufficient provision in their area to meet the needs of the children in their care. We are committed to supporting local authorities to increase the sufficiency of care placements, having invested part of our £200 million Children’s Social Care Innovation Programme in three projects to increase councils’ capacity and improve their commissioning practice. Additional funding for 2 of these projects was confirmed on 24 April as part of the £12.1 million to support vulnerable children who are most at risk. This is in addition to having funded 7 partnerships to test new approaches to commissioning and sufficiency planning in foster care, worth almost £500,000. We have provided temporary flexibility in the fostering regulations which can be found here:

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2020/445/contents/made.

This aims to make it easier for LAs to identify potential placements and ensure new foster carers are assessed and approved without delay.

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