Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the remarks by Lord Nash on 6 July (HL Deb, col GC248), whether they will provide more details of the children's service omnibus survey, including how they intend to frame the request to local authorities about how they analyse demands for services; and whether they plan to consult on the construction of the questionnaire, and if so, when and with whom.

The Department for Education (DfE) Children’s Services Survey, also referred to as the Children’s Services Omnibus Survey, is conducted by an independent research agency, NatCen social research, on behalf of the DfE.

The survey has been funded for two years and will survey local authorities twice a year. The survey will help the DfE understand key issues facing children’s services and local authorities’ experiences of implementing different policies, focusing on Early Years and Childcare, Children’s Social Care and Special Educational Needs and Disability.

The first survey was completed by local authorities in October 2016. The results from this survey will be published in a research report on the Government’s website, www.gov.uk, in spring 2017.

One of the topics local authorities were asked about in the first survey was their use of data to analyse need for services. Local authorities were asked how confident they feel that their authority is able to identify unmet needs for individual children and families. Local authorities were also asked if they have a function or team that is able to (a) analyse the demand for children’s social care; (b) compare the cost of different interventions to make planning decisions for children’s services, (c) assess the impact of different interventions to make planning decisions for children’s services; and (d) identify unmet needs for individual children and families. The questionnaire for the second survey is currently in development.

Questions for the survey are proposed by policy officials to the research team, and these are developed with an advisory group of local authority representatives. The survey is piloted in 20 local authorities; data and feedback from the pilot is used to develop the final questionnaire. The final questionnaire is signed off by children’s services policy directors.