Children: Social Services

(asked on 29th November 2016) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent work the Children's Social Care Innovation Programme has undertaken; and what assessment she has made of the effectiveness of that programme.


Answered by
Edward Timpson Portrait
Edward Timpson
This question was answered on 5th December 2016

This Government is committed to radically reforming the children’s social care system to ensure the most vulnerable children can fulfil their potential. The Innovation Programme is at the heart of this.

In its first two years the Innovation Programme invested £110million in 53 projects operating across 59% of all top-tier local authorities and involving over 120 public, private and voluntary sector organisations to test new approaches in children’s social care.

Evaluation is central to the Innovation Programme to build a strong evidence base of what works to improve outcomes for children. Independent project evaluation reports, co-ordinated by Oxford University’s Rees Centre, will be published over the next few months, with programme-wide thematic reports in summer 2017.

In April, we committed a further £200million to support innovation and improvement in children’s social care. We have recently announced funding to scale up a number of projects that have shown early signs of success, including for Pause to expand their programme supporting women to break the cycle of repeat pregnancy and social care interventions.

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