Call for all councils to receive children's services innovation funding

The Local Government Association (LGA) is to lobby government to devolve to councils a proportion of the Department for Education's improvement and innovation budget.

Such a move would help the LGA, the Association of Directors of Children's Services (ADCS) and council chief executive's group Solace to offer an enhanced programme of sector-led support. This would involve regular "health checks" for councils, training for lead members and specific support packages for struggling children's services departments.

The plans were revealed in a paper to be discussed at the LGA's children and young people board meeting on Thursday.

In the report, it says the board is "concerned about the effectiveness" of the DfE's current approach to improving children's social care services, which it says is "overly reliant on structural change as a driver for improvement despite its high cost and lack of evidence of effectiveness".

Through the Children's Social Care Innovation Programme, the DfE committed last year to provide £200m by 2020 to invest in new ways of working and models of practice. This built on £100m of innovation funding allocated between October 2014 and March 2016.

The fund has also helped a number of authorities with children's services judged "inadequate" by Ofsted create independent trusts to run children's social care.

"DfE investment has, to date, focused on councils judged inadequate by Ofsted and in ‘good' and ‘outstanding' councils, that can act as innovators and beacons of good practice," the report states.

"We believe that to achieve the National Audit Office aim of seeing more good or better children's services by 2020, a more comprehensive improvement offer needs to be made available to councils, with a specific offer to the majority of councils that ‘require improvement'.

"This needs to make use of the expertise of the whole sector, including the political and corporate leadership of councils."

Of the 136 children's services departments to have received their overall judgment, 24 per cent are inadequate, 46 per cent requires improvement, 29 per cent good and one per cent outstanding.

Last week, analysis published by the Early Intervention Foundation concluded that the lack of evidence underpinning some widely used child protection practices and approaches - including some funded through the innovation programme - means it is "difficult to be sure protection services are producing good results or providing value for money".