Cameron: Government to intervene more in child protection
Neil Puffett
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
More local authority children's services departments will be taken out of council control in order to tackle failure, Prime Minister David Cameron has said.
In a speech yesterday intended to outline government plans to "help working families and extend opportunities to all", Cameron said child protection will be a "big focus of the next five years".
He said there must be “more accountability” to end child abuse and neglect tragedies such as Victoria Climbié in 2000, Baby Peter Connelly in 2007, and Daniel Pelka in 2012.
He said that despite the fact all of the children were known to social services, nobody took sufficient responsibility.
"We will bring over the lessons we have learned in education where we have intervened quickly and put failing organisations under new leadership," he said.
"We will say to any local authority failing its children: transform the way you provide services, or those services will be taken over by non-profit trusts like those in Doncaster, and partnerships like that between Hampshire and the Isle of Wight."
Cameron’s comments come on the back of increasing numbers of local authorities being rated as "inadequate" by regulator Ofsted.
Earlier this month Sandwell Council became the latest local authority to have its children's services department given the lowest rating.
The local authority, which drafted in specialist consultancy firm Impower in November 2012 in a bid to improve services, was the fifth authority to be graded inadequate in the space of a month.
The other authorities to be rated inadequate in recent weeks are Cumbria, Lambeth, Surrey, and West Berkshire.
Cameron said that in addition to increased intervention, government will also work to support professionals on the front line.
“Social workers do a very challenging job, in fraught situations,” he said.
“And we need to help them.”
“So we will recruit the best graduate talent through Frontline – the new equivalent to Teach First to raise the status and standards of the profession.
“We will train them more rigorously.
“And we will help good social workers to stay at the front line, using their professional judgment – not be promoted away from where they are most needed.”
Cameron also said government will pursue previously announced plans to expand the Troubled Families programme to work with an additional 400,000 families by 2020.
“If we really want to extend opportunity in our country, we need to intervene more directly to help the most vulnerable families in our country,” he said.
“Our Troubled Families programme, under Louise Casey, has changed lives.
“By radically changing the way we deliver services to the hardest-to-reach families in our country, we have tackled worklessness, addiction, truancy and antisocial behaviour.”
He also said the government will be seeking to improve early years support.
“Because all the evidence shows if you focus on the early years you have the best chance of transforming a child’s life, we will look at how we can create a much more coherent offer to support children and parents in the early years, bringing together all those services targeted at getting children school-ready by age four,” he said.