Children's Improvement Board bulletins
Regular updates on the work of the Children's Improvement Board.
Children's Improvement Board
Important announcement
The Children's Improvement Board has been informed that it will no longer be receiving funding from DfE for 2013-14. In response to this announcement, the Director of CIB has issued the following statement:
Statement from the Children's Improvement Board
Tuesday 9 April, 2013
"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. 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 Department for Education 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."
Colin Hilton, Director Children's Improvement Board
The Children's Improvement Board (CIB) leads sector-led improvement in children's services.
The Children's Improvement Board is a partnership between the LGA, the Association of Directors of Children's Services (ADCS) and the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives (SOLACE), supported by funding from the Department for Education (DfE). All partners on the Board are committed to supporting local government to take charge of its own performance and improvement in the interests of children and young people.
The work of the Children's Improvement Board supports local government's overall approach to sector led improvement set out in:
Towards excellence for adult social care
An A-Z guide to the Children's Improvement Board
This brief guide gives a snapshot of work being led by the Children's Improvement Board in 2012/13.
Development demonstrators
The Children's Improvement Board is working in partnership with councils through 15 'Development Demonstrator' sites, to learn from different approaches to service improvement and development in the areas of implementing Munro recommendations, and early years.
Family Justice Review Toolkit
The aim of the Family Justice Review (FJR) was to assess how effective the current system operates and make recommendations for reform. This toolkit contains examples that Action for Children collated so that local authority staff could learn from each other and share good practice models.
Adoption information and support
The Children's Improvement Board has supported a number of local authorities to understand the performance of their adoption services and to make improvements. As part of this work, a number of diagnostic assessments have been carried out in local authorities. Drawing on the learning from these assessments and feedback from councils, CIB is now offering an adoption diagnostic to any council who may find it useful.
Supporting the effective use of data
The Children's Improvement Board (CIB), working with C4EO, is working on a programme to promote and support effective use of data and information for Children's Services. An update as at the end of March 2013 is available.
9 April 2013
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