Select committee: Education Committee
Recommendation 57
Second Report - Educational poverty: how children in residential care have been let down and what to do about it
Published 8 Jul 2022
Paragraph 135
Addressed to Department for Education
Education Committee Children's Homes All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Recommendation (the committee's words)
The Department must set out their response to the £2 billion expenditure proposed by The independent review of children’s social care, indicating how much additional funding they believe is necessary to ensure the care system is fit for purpose, how the additional funding would be deployed and the longer-term cost-benefit analysis. If Government sign off on the £2 billion funding injection, it must ensure this is ringfenced via a more intelligent funding formula that sets a minimum budget for local authority early intervention spending. In this way, additional funding would not be swallowed 52 Educational poverty: how children in residential care have been let down and what to do about it up by rising placement costs or expensive downstream social care interventions. This would rebalance the system to place greater weight on early intervention, rather than intervening at more costly crisis points downstream.
From: Education Committee, Second Report - Educational poverty: how children in residential care have been let down and what to do about it (HC 57), paragraph 135, 8 July 2022
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 10 November 2022 (deadline 8 September 2022).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government says it "fully agrees with the core message" that looked-after children are educationally disadvantaged and accepts the wide majority of recommendations fully or in part, with other recommendations handled through existing or planned reforms.
- On data, it says it "will publish the recommended breakdowns in the 2023 releases", in conjunction with its confidentiality policy, which "may result in us needing to suppress low numbers".
- On putting the extended Virtual School Head role on a statutory footing, it says longer-term plans, including whether to do so, "are under active consideration", informed by an independent evaluation.
- On a maximum 20-day timeframe for Schools Adjudicator decisions, it says this "would be unlikely to improve the speed of decisions", and it has "no plans" to extend Ofsted's remit to assess admissions.
- It is committed to a new school-movement framework and local authority backstop power, with a formal public consultation "in due course" and primary legislation "when an appropriate legislative opportunity arises".