Stephen Timms – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Education

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Stephen Timms on 2016-03-10.

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what support her Department provides for local authorities to share best practice on children’s social work.

Edward Timpson

Supporting innovation and creating the right environment to drive excellence and radically transform the lives of children and their families are essential to delivering our vision for children’s social care between now and 2020.

The Department’s £100 million Children’s Social Care Innovation Programme, established in 2013, supports 53 projects to develop, test and spread more effective ways of supporting children and families who need help from children’s social care services. The Department has invested around £7 million to evaluate the projects and these studies will provide findings for local authorities over the next year as well as making a significant contribution to establishing an evidence base for driving change.

Supporting the sector to share best practice is at the heart of our What Works Centre (WWC) and Partners in Practice (PiP) initiatives. WWC will build an evidence base to show the best practice available to help social workers and other practitioners to better support children and families. PiPs represent a genuine partnership between national and local government to support long term improvement through exploring greater freedoms in the design and delivery of services; evidence about new structural models and innovations; and modelling best practice, sharing learning and supporting the wider sector.

In addition, the Chief Social Worker for Children and Families provides support to the profession and offers independent expert advice to Ministers on social work reform.

The Department also commissions research and evaluation studies that local authorities can draw on to inform and improve their practice. A recent example is the research review of Parents’ Capacity to Change (Ward et al 2014).

All studies are published on the Department’s research pages on GOV.UK at: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-education/about/research#publications

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