Source · Select Committees · Education Committee
Recommendation 7
7
Accepted
Publish annual data on children's social care funding allocated to early intervention programmes.
Recommendation
The Department for Education and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government should publish annual data on the proportion of children’s social care funding allocated to early intervention programmes compared with later-stage interventions so that progress on this can be monitored. (Recommendation, Paragraph 20)
Government Response Summary
The government states that DfE already publishes statistics on non-Children Looked After spending on its Children’s social care dashboard, providing data to compare early and later-stage interventions, and proposes to use this metric in a new Local Government Outcomes Framework.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
The Government agrees that publishing data on the amount of children’s social care funding being spent on early intervention is important. DfE already publishes statistics on the percentage of local authority spending on children’s social care that does not go on Children Looked After (CLA). This provides data, at both an LA and England- 6 Children’s social care dashboard–GOV.UK wide level, on the proportion of funding spent on interventions that are designed to support children and families before a child needs to be taken into care, allowing us to compare funding levels for earlier-stage and later- stage interventions. This data can be found on our Children’s social care dashboard. The Deputy Prime Minister announced a plan on 3 July to move towards a new outcome-focused accountability model with a new Local Government Outcomes Framework. We are proposing to use this metric of non-CLA spending as one of the outputs in the Framework. MHCLG invited feedback on the proposed outcomes and outputs over the summer (the feedback period closed on 12 September) and welcomed engagement from local authorities and other stakeholders. Funding for the Families First Partnership Programme is allocated to local authorities through the Children’s Social Care Prevention Grant, which is ring-fenced for direct investment in additional prevention activity, and the Children and Families Grant which is ringfenced for the continuation of existing prevention services. As set out in the grant conditions, DfE expects local authorities to submit regular data to provide assurance and support understanding of the transformation and delivery progress of the reforms. This includes a quarterly breakdown of expenditure, detailing costs across transformation activity, service design and service delivery.