Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 2
2
Accepted
We are not yet convinced the Department’s dissemination of learning from the programme is delivering...
Recommendation
We are not yet convinced the Department’s dissemination of learning from the programme is delivering widespread improvement. The Innovation Programme and its successor schemes have spread practice from six promising innovations across 57 further local authorities. There is some evidence that practice from the schemes is being taken up outside the scope of the funded programme. There is encouraging early data indicating the potential impacts of projects in these successor schemes. The Department does not yet have a complete picture of the impact of the programme on outcomes for children, however, and the evaluations from the successor schemes are only due between Autumn 2022 and 2027. The Department recognises the need to balance the tensions between the time needed for its formal evaluations to report, and the desire in the sector for early action. Understanding impact is also complicated by the lack of a coherent set of outcomes for children’s social care. The Independent Review of Children’s Social Care considers that the programme’s ‘scale and spread’ approach is limited in the absence of fundamental change and that there is sufficient evidence already for investment in new approaches, warning the costs of inaction are too high. Recommendation: The Department must set out a coherent set of outcomes it expects from the sector in its response to the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, and further report on the impact of the innovation programme and successor schemes in supporting these outcomes. Recommendation: The Department should set out how it will secure a better understanding of the take-up of learning by local authorities across the country.
Government Response Summary
The government agreed and stated its strategy addresses the recommendation by promoting take up of well-evidenced models, using Practice Guides, establishing learning events, testing Family Network Support Packages, and delivering a fostering recruitment and retention programme.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. February 2023 responding to the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care. Across the strategy, the department is promoting take up of well evidenced models – for example, expanding the evidence-based Mockingbird model to support foster carers, or using learning from the Strengthening Families Protecting Children programme in its Family Help and Child Protection reforms. Practice Guides will support leaders and practitioners with the best available evidence on practice issues identified in the framework. The department will have oversight of the reform programme through its reform governance and through the data dashboard. The department will also establish learning events to bring together leaders and practitioners, which will provide an opportunity to disseminate the latest good practice and for areas to learn from each other about progress implementing reform and embedding best practice. It will also help the department to understand how learning is being taken up across the country. The department’s Regional Improvement and Support Leads will also continue to hold regular informal conversations with areas to understand how reforms are being implemented and where there are barriers to best practice. billion) since 2015. 4.3 The department has worked in close collaboration with DLUHC and HMT on the publication of Children's social care: Stable Homes, Built on Love which seeks to put children’s services on a long-term sustainable footing by pivoting majority service use to early family help and support and, where appropriate, increased (and more easily accessible) use of fostering and kinship arrangements. The government is therefore satisfied that the publication of its implementation strategy addresses this recommendation. 4.4 The government wants local authorities to use funding flexibly where there are financial barriers to implementing family-led alternatives to care, through family network support packages. The department will test how to optimise implementation of Family Network Support Packages in local areas, alongside reforms to Family Help and child protection, through an end-to-end Families First for Children Pathfinder. 4.5 Further, the department will be delivering an initial fostering recruitment and retention programme in the North-East Regional Improvement and Innovation Alliance. This will introduce a regional support hub and targeted communications and will aim to improve retention using the evidence-based model Mockingbird. The aim is to create end-to-end improvements in fostering recruitment and retention. This initial programme will allow the department to test and develop a best practice regional model that can then be delivered more widely.