Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to improve how child services protect children and young people at risk of abuse.

On 24 June the Prime Minister announced a new Child Protection Taskforce chaired by the Secretary of State for Education. The Prime Minister’s announcement can be found online here: www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-announces-new-taskforce-to-transform-child-protection. The Taskforce will lead work to: extend and accelerate reforms the quality of social work practice and leadership; develop better multi-agency working between children’s social care, the police, health and other local services; improve local authority performance and promote innovative practice; and strengthen governance and accountability in children’s social care.

To improve the quality of services, we are establishing a new national centre of expertise to identify and share high quality evidence on how to tackle child sexual abuse. We have also invested around £100 million in the Children’s Social Care Innovation Programme to develop, test and spread more effective ways of supporting children who need help from children’s social care services. Many of the projects are focused on whole system reforms in child protection services whilst others target specific challenges such as child sexual exploitation or female genital mutilation. All projects are being rigorously evaluated.

Social workers provide invaluable services to the most vulnerable children and families in societies and we are committed to improving the quality of the workforce to ensure that children are properly protected and supported. The Chief Social Worker for Children and Families introduced for the first time in the autumn a clear statement of the knowledge and skills that frontline social workers will need to have and display. We will be consulting shortly on similar statements for practice supervisors and practice leaders, key roles to drive high quality practice.

We have introduced Frontline and Step Up to Social Work programmes to attract high calibre graduates to social work, with a stronger focus on children’s statutory services. 101 Frontline participants are currently training in 18 local authorities in London and Greater Manchester and over 300 Step Up students completed training in 75 local authorities in spring 2015, and we are committed to grow these programmes. We are also working with four teaching partnerships, involving local authorities and higher education institutions, to ensure the initial training that social workers receive is more relevant to the demands of statutory roles.

We are also taking a robust approach to tackling failure in children’s services. Where performance is constantly poor, such as Doncaster, we have put in place new trust arrangements to deliver children’s social care services on behalf of a local authority. Trusts represents an opportunity to deliver a key public service in a different and ground-breaking way that better meets the needs of the children and families in the area. We have enabled strong local authorities to work with weaker ones to drive improvement, for example Hampshire are now running Isle of Wight’s children’s services following evidence of inadequate performance in child protection.