Tag: Nadhim Zahawi

Below is the text of the speech made by Nadhim Zahawi, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education, in the House of Commons on 18 June 2019.

Education should give every child, no matter their background, the opportunity to reach their full potential. To this end, we are announcing the conclusion of the children in need review, delivering the Government’s manifesto commitment to better understand how we can improve the educational outcomes of children who have needed a social worker.

Through our reforms to social care and across Government, we are already taking action to improve safety and stability for these children: strengthening families and tackling domestic abuse, poor mental health and substance misuse, which are prevalent drivers of need. Through our action to drive up the quality of services in local authorities and to develop a highly capable, skilled social work workforce, we have seen the number of local authorities judged inadequate decline by around a quarter since 2017—providing consistently better services for thousands of children and families across the country.

We have also delivered significant work to raise the educational attainment of our most disadvantaged children. This includes the Timpson review of school exclusions, reforms to alternative provision, delivering on the 2014 SEND reforms, and ensuring a system of advocacy and support for looked after children.

Children in need are those who need a social worker for help or protection, including children on a child in need plan or a child protection plan, looked after children, and disabled children. The children in need review set out to assess the educational outcomes of this group of children and what actions and interventions are needed to improve them. As part of the review we have developed new data and analysis, conducted a broad programme of qualitative evidence gathering, including a call for evidence and literature review, and engaged with practitioners working in education and social care, as well as children and young people with experience of being supported by social care.​

The review has evidenced, for the first time, the prevalence of children who have needed a social worker currently or previously, and the extent of these children’s lasting poor educational outcomes. We now know that 1.6 million children have needed a social worker at some point, equivalent to one in 10 last year. This group do significantly worse than others at all stages of education. Of young people who needed a social worker in their GCSE year, by age 21, half had still not achieved level 2 qualifications (which include GCSEs) compared to 12% of those not in need.

The review has developed four priority areas for action, and identified where we can start work immediately. These are: promoting visibility and recognition, not only for the purposes of safeguarding but in education; keeping children in school, making sure education is a protective factor against abuse, neglect and exploitation; raising aspiration to believe that more is possible of this group of children; and finally, supporting schools to support children themselves—recognising the consequences of childhood adversity on attendance, learning, behaviour and mental health.

The immediate action we will take includes:

Clarifying and strengthening our expectations around information sharing between and within schools and social care;

Continuing to improve our national data on this group;

Improving clarity, timeliness and transparency around in-year admissions;

Developing much-needed new research on tackling absence;

Consulting on strengthening the role of the designated safeguarding lead in schools, and exploring whether there is a case for extending and adapting the scope of virtual school heads;

Building on reforms to mental health support, by identifying and sharing best practice around responding to the lasting impacts of childhood adversity;

Working with What Works for Children’s Social Care to analyse which interventions, trialled by the education endowment foundation, are most effective for children with a social worker.

This action aims to ensure that every child can benefit from their education, ensuring they have the knowledge and skills to fulfil their potential, and the resilience they need for future success. However, it is only a start. To support families and communities, the whole of Government will continue to work together in preventing and tackling the causes of need, from the early years through to adolescence.

The report “Help, Protection, Education: concluding the children in need review” has been published alongside a companion data and analysis document on gov.uk. I will place a copy of the documents published in the Libraries of both Houses.

Below is the text of the speech made by Nadhim Zahawi, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Children and Families, on 28 February 2019.

Thank you very much for inviting me. A particular thanks to the member for Manchester Central, Lucy Powell, for inviting me here today, and for continuing to keep the political focus on school readiness in Greater Manchester. I am truly delighted to see such a range of early years professionals here today, and I would like to personally thank you for the hard work that you do. I know that all of you – whatever your role – share my passion and enthusiasm for ensuring our children get the best start in life.

School readiness is hugely important, and that is why the Department for Education has such a focus on the early years, and on improving communication and language skills in particular.

This is something that is very personal to me. Some of you may know that, at the age of nine when I came to this country from Baghdad, I couldn’t speak English, and I used to sit at the back of the classroom so the teachers didn’t ask me to speak in class. Sometimes when I got a bit more confident I tried to bring a few sentences together. My teachers thought I had learning difficulties. I now stand before you as MP for Shakespeare! But I had great parents and some great role models, and I learned English and then learned that being able to express yourself is the gateway to success, not just in school but in later life.

It’s these crucial early years that make the most impact on a child’s future path – because for those children who start out behind their peers, it’s so much harder to catch up. All the evidence tells us that we need to improve children’s communication and language before they arrive at school, to get them on track to be confident, able learners.

The Education Secretary has set a challenging ambition to halve the proportion of children leaving reception without the communication, language and literacy skills they need to thrive, over the next ten years. If we are to meet this ambition, we need to find new and creative ways of supporting children and families – as well as our workforce.

Greater Manchester is leading the way, and I am delighted to be here to talk about how we can work together to design and deliver systems both locally and nationally that can hopefully ensure every child is able to thrive when they start school.

I strongly believe that a key role for us in central Government is to support local leaders and professionals to innovate; and for Government to ensure the best ideas are able to flourish. The Children’s Social Care Innovation Programme has been a successful example of that approach. And our £6.5m Early Outcomes Fund draws on those lessons to help local authorities improve how they deliver services to improve early language outcomes. We will announce the outcome of that fund very shortly.

Today I want to highlight some further examples of where local innovation and central policymaking are coming together to drive progress towards our shared ambition. These broadly cover three areas.

The first of these is to address the work of the wider professionals involved in a child’s life.

This ranges from GPs, health visitors, speech, language and communication therapists and many more. Health visitors play a particularly important role in identifying and supporting children with speech, language and communication needs.

That is why my Department – in partnership with Public Health England – will train 1,000 health visitors. Wave 1 will begin shortly in areas of high need, including Oldham and Tameside.

This is an area where Greater Manchester is really blazing a trail – both through your language pathway and your investment in tools to identify speech, language and communication needs early. Together these are designed to support the local workforce to identify speech, language and communication needs as early as possible and put in place support that is needed.

Again, this is an important example of how Government can take innovative practice and take it to scale. My Department – again in partnership with Public Health England – is developing a new bespoke early language assessment tool, under government copyright, that will be made available to health visitors and professionals across a wide range of local authorities in need.

Today, I am pleased to announce that the University of Newcastle, led by James Law – Professor of Speech and Language Science – will develop our early language assessment tool. The team working on this tool has extensive expertise in speech and language therapy, health visiting and general practice, and academic expertise in linguistics, psychology and statistics.

We are also working with Public Health England to publish early language pathway guidance which will support local areas to develop and implement their own pathway – similar to that which you have done in Greater Manchester. You have really been the pioneers of this.

Of course, the most important people in a child’s life are their parents. Which brings me onto the second area I want to talk about – improving the Home Learning Environment. Because the evidence is clear that what happens at home in the early years is absolutely key to outcomes later in life.

That is why, in November, the Department held a summit, at which we brought together a coalition of over 120 businesses, voluntary groups, community and public sector organisations. These organisations all share a common goal – to help parents kick start their child’s early communication, language and literacy development at home.

We want to get across that there are really simple, everyday things that every parent can do more of to help their children’s language and literacy.

Since the summit, I have been working with some of these organisations to bring their commitments to life, and it is no surprise to me to find that there is some excellent, innovative practice here in Manchester. Today after this summit, I am visiting Manchester City Football Club, to observe one of their sessions that uses physical activity to enhance children’s communication and language.

Our next steps are to launch a public campaign to encourage parents to chat, play and read more with their children. I recognise that it is important to get this message out there in local communities if we want to see a change in parental behaviour, and for this to work, I will really need your help and expertise.

Our public, private and voluntary sectors are all a vital part of this coalition. From early years settings to libraries, from health visitors to local employers, everyone has an important role to play as part of this society-wide mission to improve the home learning environment.

One of the most important contributions comes, of course, from early years professionals. And this brings me onto the third and final area I want to talk about today – which is supporting the work of our early years settings. I am always struck by the passion and commitment that I see first-hand when I visit early years settings up and down the country. I want to be able to support you to do your job as best as I can.

I know this is a key focus for Greater Manchester. It is for me too. My department’s Workforce Strategy, published in March 2017, has resulted in a number of developments to support the early years sector in recruiting, retaining and developing its workforce. These include publishing new level 2 qualification criteria, and a new early years career progression map – both developed through work with sector stakeholders.

I am also delighted to hear that you are encouraging and supporting the use of apprenticeships for your early years workforce. For employers, developing well trained and highly motivated staff who work to the standards they expect is hugely valuable. I am an enthusiastic supporter of apprenticeships and the grow-your-own ethos of the sector.

I also want to address the importance of continued professional development, which I know is another key focus for Greater Manchester. This is why my Department – in partnership with the Education Endowment Foundation – is investing £5 million to fund and evaluate projects focused on high quality professional development and practice in the early years.

And I recently announced a £20m Early Years Professional Development Fund, to help practitioners improve children’s early language, literacy and numeracy. This will be delivered via a ‘train the trainer’ model – much like your planned workforce academy. We recently tendered for a national training partner and are currently assessing the bids. I hope to be in a position to announce the preferred bidder shortly.

Now there is one small but important group of early years settings that I want to mention in particular – Maintained Nursery Schools.

The supplementary funding that my Department provides local authorities to enable them to protect Maintained Nursery School funding and reflect their higher costs is due to end by March 2020. What happens after that will be determined by the Spending Review. But the Spending Review has not yet happened, and this has created an unusual problem for local authorities and Maintained Nursery Schools.

Rightly, you want to allocate places in Maintained Nursery Schools for this September in good faith, but without knowing whether the summer term of 2020 will be fully funded.

Today I can reassure you that you can indeed offer places in good faith. We will provide local authorities with a further £24 million for their Maintained Nursery Schools, to enable them to continue funding them at a higher rate for the whole of the 2020-21 academic year.

This should remove the immediate concerns about Maintained Nursery Schools. I know that this does not answer the question about their long-term future. But I think this is a pragmatic response – I hope you’ll agree – that recognises the excellent work that many Maintained Nursery Schools do. And it allows the Spending Review to determine the longer-term future of Maintained Nursery Schools, alongside wider early years considerations.

I have set out this morning some examples of the relationship between central government and local leaders and professionals working at its best, taking innovations to scale. In short, if we are to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children, we must think about how we can do things differently – including through parents.

No parent has all the answers – so we need to make it easier for them to kickstart their child’s learning at the earliest opportunity, whether by encouraging them to take part in educational activities as a family, support from trained experts at home to identify concerns earlier, or better access to high-quality early years education.” I look forward to working together to give all children the best chance to flourish at school and in later life.

Thank you.

Below is the text of the statement made by Nadhim Zahawi, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education, in the House of Commons on 2 July 2018.

I wish to update the House on two important changes the Government are making to childcare.

I have today laid a new statutory instrument, the Childcare (Disqualification) Regulations and Childcare (Early Years Provision Free of Charge) (Extended Entitlement) (Amendment) Regulations 2018. This SI, which will come into force on 31 August 2018, makes important changes to improve the fairness of the childcare disqualification arrangements and extend 30 hours free childcare to children in foster care.

The childcare disqualification arrangements are an important part of the strong set of safeguards we have in place to ensure the safety and welfare of our children and young people. These arrangements apply exclusively to individuals working in childcare in schools and the private and voluntary sectors, up to and including reception classes, and in wraparound care for children up to the age of eight. These arrangements build on the safeguards provided by the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) regime, which all schools and early years childcare providers must operate.

Under the arrangements, any individual who has committed an offence, or who is in breach of other criteria set out in legislation, is prohibited from working in these settings. The arrangements also include provision that disqualifies an individual from working in childcare because of an offence committed by someone who lives or works in their household, known as disqualification by association. This means that a member of staff is unable to work in childcare even though they themselves have not committed a relevant offence.

Disqualified individuals can obtain a waiver from Ofsted against their disqualification. Employers must suspend or redeploy the individual until a waiver is granted, as individuals who are disqualified cannot work in childcare without an Ofsted waiver. This provision has unfortunately been widely misunderstood and a number of individuals have been redeployed or suspended unnecessarily. Consequently, the disqualification by association provision is having a detrimental impact on employers and employees, as well as family life. It is also having a negative impact on the rehabilitation of offenders.

In response to widespread concerns about the disqualification by association provision, the Department for Education undertook a public consultation on options ​for its reform. We were most grateful for the near 450 responses received. The responses to the consultation largely reiterated the earlier concerns. The consultation strongly favoured reform, and the majority of respondents advocated the removal of disqualification by association in non-domestic settings.

Making new regulations enables us to address these concerns, by removing the disqualification by association where childcare is provided in non-domestic settings, where other safeguarding measures are well observed and followed. The disqualification by association provision will however continue to apply where childcare is provided in domestic settings, where it provides an important safeguard.

We are supporting the changes we are making with new statutory guidance. This will reinforce existing messages about the importance of employers undertaking safer recruitment checks and provide them with advice on how they can manage their workforce in the absence of the disqualification by association component of the arrangements. The Department for Education will also continue to provide a helpline and mailbox to employers and employees to help them with the arrangements.

The Government are also extending 30 hours free childcare for three and four-year-olds to children in foster care. This is a key Government early years policy, and foster families should have access to the same support and opportunities that all families have.

This Government’s ambitions for children during and after being looked after are the same as for any other child: that they have access to good health and wellbeing, fulfil their educational potential, build and maintain lasting relationships and participate positively in society. The role of the foster parent is central to achieving those high ambitions for the children in their care. Fostering provides stability, a home and an alternative family. Children in foster care want to feel part of a family and have a normal family life. We need to support foster parents and local authorities in a way that achieves that. That includes foster parents being able to work outside their caring responsibilities, where it is right for the child.

The SI I have laid today enables us to realise those ambitions, by allowing children in foster care to receive 30 hours free childcare where the following criteria are met:

That accessing the extended hours is consistent with the child’s care plan, placing the child at the centre of the process and decision making, and

that, in single parent families, the foster parent holds additional employment outside of their role as a foster parent; or

that in two parent families, both parents hold additional employment outside of their role as a foster parent.

The SI makes it clear that the eligibility of children in foster care will be determined by the responsible local authority.

We are supporting the changes with new statutory guidance and operational guidance. These will provide local authorities with detailed guidance on how they can discharge their duty to secure 30 hours free childcare for children in foster care, and ensure that the additional eligibility criteria are met.

Copies of the SI, our statutory and operational guidance documents, and the Government’s response to the consultation on changes to the childcare disqualification arrangements will be placed in the House Library.

Below is the text of the speech made by Nadhim Zahawi, the Minister for Children and Families, at the National Learning Conference on 27 February 2018.

Good Morning. I’m delighted to see so many people have braved the arctic weather to be here today – thank you.

I know you all have incredibly busy jobs and that it’s not easy to take time away, but I do believe that you will leave at the end of the day pleased that you did make the time. I hope you will leave enthused and with the ideas, connections and tools to continue that ever important quest of providing the best support to children and their families.

I am delighted to have been appointed to my first ministerial role – and even more happy and elated for that role to be focusing on supporting our most vulnerable children and families. I genuinely think I have the best portfolio in the department, if not the best job in government!

As you know, my background is in business and in particular in market research. But if setting up and running YouGov taught me anything, it’s that if you want to really understand an issue you need to get out there and talk to the people who live and breathe it every single day.

So I wanted to get out and meet social workers and leaders across the country straight away – literally two days into the job I went to Hackney with our Chief Social Worker, Isabelle Trowler, to learn about how they turned that services around and to discuss our reform programme.

I’ve since been to Doncaster and Wigan, and have met with our Partners in Practice. I am excited and looking forward to getting out more over the coming months.

I can honestly say that the social workers I’ve spoken to are some of the most dedicated and inspiring people that I have had privileged pleasure to met in my life. As an MP, I would often get people in my surgery talking about their experiences with children’s social care, and it was often so overwhelming. By the end of a 15-20 minute appointment with a family, I would find it almost impossible to breathe, let alone think. You do this every day. So I have the upmost respect and admiration for our people who do this job day in and day out.

I have been particularly struck by the commitment and passion of the social workers I’ve met doing the best they can for the children and families they are working with. That includes constantly looking for more effective ways of supporting children, building their understanding of what works and learning from the experience of their peers.

I don’t think I need to tell you that social workers are central to solving the challenges we face in children’s social care, or that investing in them is absolutely key.

But as leaders, you know as well as I do that enabling social workers to do the best for children is about more than training, or caseloads, or staff turnover.

Not that those things aren’t important – they absolutely are important. But to achieve the scale of improvement that Eileen Munro identified we need, we must build a whole system that creates the space for excellent social work practice to flourish.

That’s the ambition that we set out in ‘Putting Children First’ – taking action across the whole system to transform social work practice. An ambition that I’m determined to deliver on – building on the hard work of my predecessors and working with you as leaders across the country. And of course I have to pay tribute to Graham Archer and my team who I have to say, coming from the private sector, are phenomenal human beings.

If we want dynamic social work where excellent practitioners can reach their potential then we have to build a permissive, creative and supportive environment in which social workers have the confidence and freedom to develop and test new ways of working.

That is exactly what the Children’s Social Care Innovation Programme was set up to do – providing funding and support as well as the ‘licence’ to test different ways of working. And helping to build a system that is open to innovation and that learns from best practice as well as from when things go wrong.

Through the Innovation Programme we have invested almost £200m in 95 projects. Some of these projects are rethinking the whole of a children’s social care system in a local authority. Others are redesigning support for young people around a single trusted person. And others still are adopting and adapting from elsewhere new ways of supporting foster parents.

Many of those projects are already having a positive impact on systems, practice and, most importantly, on outcomes for children. You will have the opportunity to hear from many of those today.

But to give just one example – the first ever project funded through the Innovation Programme was ‘Focus on Practice’ which aimed to completely redesign the Triborough’s entire children’s social care system so that professionals could spend more time with children and families, and so that practice was rooted in greater expertise and evidence. The project has already started to show positive results including Ofsted finding that Focus on Practice was making an effective contribution to practice. The independent evaluation found that, as well as reductions in placements costs, staff absence and use of agency staff had also reduced, indicating improved staff wellbeing.

And Triborough has now set up the Centre for Systemic Social Work to share their learning and enable other authorities to embed systemic practice, improving services and outcomes for children.

With the Innovation Programme we set out to support genuine innovation to catalyse a real step change in practice.

And I’m delighted to announce today three new innovation projects supported by the Programme. We are investing up to £5m in Social Impact Bonds to support care leavers as they transition to adulthood and independent living in Sheffield, Bristol and in Lewisham. These Social Impact Bonds are a first for the Innovation Programme and a first for care leavers – testing new commissioning and funding models to support care leavers in to education, training and employment.

I’m also pleased to announce that Spectra First will deliver the Care Leaver Covenant on behalf of the Department. The Care Leaver Covenant is a fantastic opportunity for organisations in civil society to sign up to helping care leavers get the practical support other young people get from their families when starting out in life and becoming more independent. That means helping them in a range of practical ways. It could be helping them access and benefit from education, employment and training opportunities, for instance by offering apprenticeships, making sure they’ve got a set of interview clothes so they feel confident when they walk through the door, or providing discounted and free offers such as gym membership that helps combat social isolation and loneliness. The Covenant is a way of making that happen and getting a wide range of organisations involved providing care leavers with the chances they need and deserve.

We know the difference that local authorities at their best can make to the lives of care leavers and the work Mark Riddell did in Trafford before being appointed the Department’s national adviser for care leavers is testament to that. I know from my conversations with Mark that together we could do so much more to help care leavers raise and achieve their aspirations. So I very much look forward to seeing the exciting possibilities that I know all those Covenant pledges will bring.

Now I don’t underestimate the impact that individual innovation projects have had on systems, practice and on outcomes for children.

But the collective impact of the Innovation Programme is arguably even more important – the potential it has to build our understanding of what works in supporting vulnerable children and in driving improvement across the whole system.

Robust, independent evaluation is critical to building the evidence base of what works. I hope you have seen the 57 individual project evaluations that we have published to date, as well as thematic reports, and an overarching evaluation report? Huge thanks to Professor Judy Sebba and her team at the Rees Centre at Oxford University for their work coordinating the evaluations.

Understanding and learning from what works isn’t enough, though. It’s a bit of a cliché to say that we learn most from failing. But like most clichés, it is essentially true. Learning from when things go wrong is just as important – and we must make sure that the system as a whole learns from when things go wrong.

That is why we are committed to strengthening arrangements for learning from the cases involving the serious harm of children to swiftly inform child safeguarding policy and practice at all levels.

We are in the process of setting up a new independent Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel and hope to be able to announce the chair and members very soon.

This first National Learning Conference is an important part of sharing the learning from the Innovation Programme. And I hope it won’t be the last opportunity to share learning nationally, both from the Innovation Programme and of course more broadly.

I’m delighted that we are working with innovation experts from Nesta, SCIE [sky], and FutureGov, as well as expert researchers from Cardiff University to establish a new What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care.

The What Works Centre’s focus is to improve outcomes for children and their families by developing a powerful evidence base, and supporting its translation into better practice on the ground. It aims to identify the most effective interventions and practice systems and support their implementation by practitioners and decision makers.

It will join the world’s first network of What Works Centres, which support policy makers, practitioners and commissioners to make decisions based on strong evidence of what works.

I’m really excited about the potential here to make a real difference to establishing a credible, trusted voice on what works in children’s social care that is integral to social work practice and development.

The What Works Centre will only reach that potential though, if it is delivering what you as leaders and practitioners in children’s social care need in a way that is accessible and practical. And to do that they need to hear from you and to work with you.

I know the What Works Centre team have spent much of the last few months talking to you to understand what you need and how they can work with you to fill the gaps that are there.

I would encourage you to continue to talk to them, to challenge them, and to support them. They are here to work with you, to make your work easier and support you to do the best for the children you work with.

That’s probably enough from me. Today is really about you going out and learning from the experts – each other. You are the experts. I look forward to meeting you and discussing ideas with you over the course of today and the coming months.

Enjoy the rest of the day – thank you for being here and for the work you do for our children.