Delivering Children’s Services in Challenging Times

The report provides original insight and analysis on children’s services in county areas, as well as policy proposals to Government. The report also includes a number of think pieces on the challenges and opportunities for county children’s services over the course of this Parliament from leading figures in the sector.

The report can be found here.

Importantly, the report sets out a number of good practice examples from CCN member councils in areas such as adoption, Troubled Families and the journey from an ‘Inadequate’ Ofsted inspection to a ‘Good’ judgement.

The overarching proposals to Government are:

• Funding formulae for the provision of Children’s Services must be reviewed to ensure that they adequately reflect demand led pressures.

• Government prioritise partnerships between local authorities to improve ‘failing’ children’s services departments, rather than placing them in to control of democratically unaccountable independent trusts.

• The Government’s Child Protection Taskforce must engage with counties to ensure that good practice to improve the recruitment and retention of children’s social workers is identified and used to shape future policy decisions.

The trade press have published stories on the report, these can be found here:

MJ: Children’s services facing ‘severe’ financial pressures

LGC: Counties struggle with 57 pc increase in children’s services demand