Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to help local authorities improve their support for vulnerable children.

The department aims to provide world-class education, training and care for everyone, whatever their background. We work closely with local authorities to make sure that everyone has the chance to reach their potential and to live a more fulfilled life.

We currently have an improvement system which seeks to identify local authorities with children’s services at risk of failing and to work collaboratively with them to put in place targeted support to help them improve the services they provide to vulnerable children and families.

Working closely with the sector, we have identified areas where help is needed to avoid failure, funding good local authorities to provide peer support on children’s services through the Partners in Practice programme to more than 80 authorities, with work underway to broker support for many more. We are investing £3 million over the 3 years to March 2021 to support leadership across children’s services, working with the Local Government Association. 146 local authorities out of a total of 151 have benefited from the programme.

Since the programme rolled out in November 2017, we have identified many local authorities who would benefit from additional help to avoid the risk of potential failure and have provided immediate support. As a result, we have seen an overall improvement in the quality of children’s services as judged by Ofsted. At the end of August 2020, 50% of local authorities were judged Good or Outstanding at their most recent inspection. This is 14 percentage points higher than the proportion judged Good or Outstanding following each authority’s first inspection under the previous Ofsted framework.

The department also acts quickly and decisively to intervene in local authorities found to be failing in their delivery of children’s services and judged Inadequate by Ofsted. Our intervention brings results: the first children’s services trust in Doncaster moved from Inadequate to Good in just 2 years, and after almost a decade of deeply entrenched failure, children’s services in Birmingham are no longer Inadequate. Where we have intervened and provided support, other local authorities have moved from Inadequate to Good, such as Rotherham and Barnet. All the local authorities judged Inadequate that were inspected in 2019 subsequently improved to be Good or Requiring Improvement.

Our aim is to continue the improvements we are making at pace so that, by 2022, less than 10% of local authorities are rated Inadequate by Ofsted, halving failure rates within 5 years and providing consistently better services for thousands of children and families across the country.

Similarly, our vision for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) is the same as for all children – that they achieve well in their early years, at school and in college, that they find employment, lead happy and fulfilled lives, and experience choice and control. We are driving high performance across local area SEND services, aiming for 75% of areas delivering good quality SEND services. We are working closely with Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission to identify areas of weakness through the Interim Visits programme and the current inspection cycle. To reflect our ambitious programme of improvement in this area, we have commissioned a new, rolling cycle of Area SEND inspections to commence in 2022.

In relation to helping local authorities improve support for vulnerable children during the COVID-19 outbreak, the safety and wellbeing of the most vulnerable children has always been our priority. This is why nurseries and colleges have remained open to them because it the safest place for them to be.

Over recent months, we have worked across the government to improve what we know about the children and young people who are most at risk. We have worked closely with local authorities to improve our understanding of how COVID-19 is impacting children’s social care services across the country and how we can best support or challenge individual councils to protect the most vulnerable children in their care.

Regional Education and Children’s Teams (REACT) have been established to better co-ordinate how the department captures information and intelligence about local needs and circumstances in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, including in relation to vulnerable children, whilst offering support where it is needed.

More widely, during March and April 2020, the government provided £3.2 billion of emergency grant funding and over £5 billion of cashflow support to support local authorities with the COVID-19 outbreak.

On 2 July, the government announced a new comprehensive package of support to address spending pressures and in recognition of lost income. A further £500 million brought funding, given to support local councils with pressures, to £4.3 billion. This funding is un-ringfenced, recognising local authorities are best placed to decide how to meet the major service pressures in their local area, including support for children’s services, that have been caused by the COVID-19 outbreak.