DfE axes Children’s Improvement Board funding
The government is to stop funding the Children’s Improvement Board just two years after it was set up, it has been announced.
The body, which is responsible for helping councils improve their children’s services and implementing government policies, received £10.5m from the Department for Education (DfE) in 2011/12 and £8m in 2012/13.
But the board has now been told that it will not be funded in the current financial year.
A DfE spokesman said it was always intended that support for the board would be “time-limited” and that, in the longer term, “sector-led improvement should mean ‘sector-funded’”.
The board’s director, Colin Hilton, warned that the move risks jeopardising work to improve local authority performance on adoption, sexual exploitation and learning from child abuse cases.
“We knew this funding was always going to be time-limited, but this announcement comes as a complete shock when we are already a week into the new financial year,” he said.
“It leaves no time for contingency planning and puts at risk the good work carried out by the Children’s Improvement Board in supporting councils to improve their children’s services.
“Since the ministerial announcement of our continued funding last autumn, we have worked with the DfE and agreed on plans for improving performance on adoption, tackling child sexual exploitation and learning lessons from serious case reviews. This decision will now throw this important work into doubt.
“We know Whitehall intervention is not the answer to protecting vulnerable children and a sector-led approach is the best way forward.
“However, such work needs to be adequately resourced and it is untenable to throw the full weight of this on councils, which are already contending with government cuts to their budgets by a third.”
Established in 2011, the board is a partnership between the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS), the Local Government Association and the council chief executives’ group SOLACE.
Andrew Webb, president of the ADCS, said local authorities are working hard to improve the services they provide and there has been improvement since the board was introduced.
“The strengths of peer-to-peer support and challenge are well recognised as a way of driving sustainable improvement and have proven not only to deliver results, but also to be cost-effective,” he said.
“In a time of diminishing budgets and rising expectations of what children’s services can and should deliver, the Children’s Improvement Board was a vital way of driving improvement.
“The decision to abolish it is out of step with the progress being made by the sector with its help.”
A DfE spokesman said: “It is the responsibility of local government, working with delivery partners, to lead its own performance improvement and take individual and collective responsibility for achieving better outcomes for children.
“At a national level, the department will continue to work to drive improvement across children’s services; freeing up local authorities from unnecessary bureaucracy, improving the quality of the workforce and taking focused action in areas where performance across the country is not strong enough.
“Our work on adoption, on early years and on implementing the Munro Review of Child Protection are just some areas where we have made significant progress this year.”
Source: CYPNow
