programme at the National Grid.
It's part of our agenda for special educational needs (SEN) reform to spread the message that young people with SEN can and should be enabled to do paid work.
I was delighted to hear from National Grid managers about how not only the young people with SEN and disabilities had benefited and contributed, but how the staff too had benefited and been inspired by working with these young people.
SEN is an area of policy that touches so many families, children and young people, and which I've spent a huge amount of time wrestling with over the past couple of years.
Improved relationship
The passage of the Children and Families Act last year should mark a step change in the relationship between families and local authorities, with a new SEN system designed to empower families and wrap services around the needs of children.
From the local offer giving families the information they need to navigate services, to the swifter and more streamlined assessment process designed to end the frustration of families having to repeat the same information over and over again, this is a system that puts families at the heart of the process.
Behind the simplified new family-facing system, of course, is an awful lot of very complicated work - the joint commissioning of health and social care, the planning for personal budgets, developing partnerships with schools. I know how hard people in the sector are working to deliver these reforms, and I thank them.
Delivering children's social care, whether to those with SEN and disabilities, or to children at risk of abuse and neglect, to victims of child sexual exploitation (CSE) or potential victims of female genital mutilation (FGM), is an extraordinarily complex process. The work can appear thankless to those on the frontline, as successes go unnoticed and practise failures publicly punished. But that shouldn't be allowed to create an unduly negative view of what social workers do. I spend a lot more time praising them than I do criticising.
We have a big reform agenda under way to help to drive up standards in the profession; but all of it works in partnership with the profession, not against it. From funding new training programmes such as Step Up to Social Work - which has had more than 10,000 expressions of interest for its fourth wave - and Frontline, to driving system reform through our £100m Innovation Programme, we are working hard to improve children's social work.
On the Innovation Programme, we have seen some really impressive thinking emerge about how to do things in different, or better, ways. We had 285 expressions of interest to the programme and we are working with 68 to bring them to the Investment Board, which makes the final recommendations to me. So far, 19 projects have been funded, and I'm signing new ones off every week.
Social work redesign
No fewer than 23 local authorities are now being funded by the Innovation Programme to redesign their entire children's social work delivery, some of them modelled around the Hackney Reclaiming Social Work model created by our chief social worker for children Isabelle Trowler, others around the Signs of Safety methodology, championed by Professor Eileen Munro. Last month, Islington and Newcastle were added, both of them backed with more than £2.5m to deliver a fundamental redesign of children's social care.
We are also providing Hertfordshire County Council with £4.8m to redesign services for vulnerable families by bringing together children's social workers with specialists in adult mental health in new, integrated family safeguarding teams that work closely with schools and better support families - in effect, one-stop shops for families on the edge of crisis. And we are funding innovative new projects in the areas of CSE and FGM, which you will hear more about in due course.
I am proud to be the minister for this sector. Continuing to work closely with you for the sake of the most vulnerable children and families in society is my priority, and with the above bids being just a taste of what's to come, I know we're already on to a solid start.
