Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to support Sandwell Children's services to improve by their next inspection.

The Department for Education takes any failure to deliver services at the required level extremely seriously. The department is currently considering all the available evidence in order to act in a way which provides sustainable improvements for the children of Sandwell, ensuring that the services received by children, young people and their families improve to the required level.

The department believes that Sandwell has had sufficient time to make the necessary improvements. Sandwell was originally rated as ‘inadequate’ by Ofsted in January 2010. During the five years in which Sandwell has been subject to intervention arrangements, a large number of local authorities have managed to improve their services to meet the required standard.

The department currently intervenes in 20 local authorities in which children’s social care services have been identified by Ofsted as failing children and young people. The interventions include a range of strategies, from enhanced oversight by department officials, independent advisors or commissioners, through to more extreme cases which have required the department to remove services from the local authority’s control. The level of support provided will depend on the scale of the issues identified by Ofsted and the capacity of the authority to address them.