Goodwill announces £20m drive to improve children's services
Tristan Donovan
Thursday, October 12, 2017
The Department for Education has set aside up to £20m to encourage councils to support each other to improve children's services standards, children's minister Robert Goodwill has announced.
Speaking at the National Children and Adult Services Conference in Bournemouth, Goodwill said the money will be used to trial "regional improvement alliances" of neighbouring authorities within which councils will challenge each other on standards, agree improvement priorities and share best practice.
The DfE said the alliances will form "the backbone" of its efforts to find ways to raise the quality of children's social care. It hopes to establish alliances in every region of England by April 2018.
The Association of Directors of Children's Services (ADCS) and the Local Government Association will be working with the DfE to create the alliances.
The money announced by Goodwill will also enable more councils with "good" or "outstanding" Ofsted ratings to apply to join the existing Partners in Practice programme, which will see them work with the DfE to develop innovative approaches to service delivery.
"Too many young people and their families are being let down by poor quality services - or worse, left at risk of harm," Goodwill said.
"My commitment is that we will build a self-improving system, one that spots where challenges are emerging and quickly puts the right support in place."
Figures collated by the ADCS show that of the 146 councils inspected by Ofsted under the single inspection framework as of 25 September, 30 were deemed inadequate and a further 67 require improvement.
The DfE has been working for some time to develop ways to identify authorities with falling standards so that faster action to turn them around can take place.
Goodwill also announced that a consortium led by innovation charity Nesta will set up the What Works Centre for Children's Social Care that will gather and disseminate evidence on effective social care practice to social workers and local decision-makers.
"Nesta and our partners SCIE, the Alliance for Useful Evidence, FutureGov and Traversum will be working very closely with frontline professionals, listening, learning and adapting to feedback and evidence throughout this set-up phase," Geoff Mulgan, chief executive of Nesta, said.
"We'll also draw on the experiences of other What Works Centres on how to gather evidence, but even more importantly, how to make it useful and used."
The What Works Centre for Children's Social Care was first announced in January 2016 and was supposed to launch later that year.