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29 Jan 13
Councils are to lose their power to inspect and assess local child care services, ministers have announced.
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24 Jan 13
A £150m funding cut to local authority children’s services is to be returned as part of reforms to the adoption system, the government has announced.
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23 Jan 13
Early results from the cross-government Troubled Families Programme indicate that effective intervention can save councils substantial sums, Communities Secretary Eric Pickles said today.
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22 Jan 13
The government’s decision to transfer the statutory careers guidance duty for young people from councils to schools is ‘regrettable’, MPs have said.
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15 Jan 13
The Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service should be subject to a single annual inspection from September, Ofsted has proposed.
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15 Jan 13
Councils are calling on the government to explain why it has made new and unexpected cuts of almost £50m to funds intended to support disadvantaged children and families.
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14 Jan 13
Councils have urged the government to speed up reforms to the adoption system, warning that ‘ridiculous’ bureaucracy is hampering attempts to recruit more parents.
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7 Jan 13
Government plans to limit benefits increases to 1% in each of the next three years will push more families into poverty, campaigners warned today.
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4 Jan 13
Imminent changes to eligibility for Child Benefit will create ‘incoherence’ in the welfare system, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned.
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18 Dec 12
Health providers should be legally compelled to provide Special Educational Needs services and assessments, according to MPs.
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17 Dec 12
Almost 25,000 extra nursery places will be required in London next year to meet a pledge by the deputy prime minister to provide free part-time early-years education for the poorest 20% of two-year-...
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30 Nov 12
Councils have criticised the latest publication of adoption scorecards by the government, warning that the data could lead to ‘misleading’ comparisons between authorities.
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19 Nov 12
Education Secretary Michael Gove has urged local authorities to take more at-risk children into care, saying an increase in young people being looked after by councils was not a cause for concern.
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15 Nov 12
Ministers are consulting on a new measure of child poverty, saying the current focus on relative income excludes other vital factors.
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6 Nov 12
Reductions in local government funding could lead to some abused children falling through the social services net, MPs warned today.
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5 Nov 12
Changes at the Department for Education could lead to a reduced focus on early years policy, MPs warned today.
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25 Oct 12
Pressure on council children’s services is mounting as more children are taken into care, a local authority survey has shown.
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24 Oct 12
Plans to cut £150m from council funding for children’s services could ‘severely hamper’ town halls’ early intervention programmes and put Sure Start children’s centres at risk, the Local Government...
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19 Oct 12
Procedures for delivering children’s care services are loaded in favour of local authority provision and are failing vulnerable Scottish youngsters, an alliance of third and private sector providers...
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10 Oct 12
Council ‘virtual schools’ have had little success in closing the education gap between children in care and other pupils, Ofsted has concluded.
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8 Oct 12
The government will cut another £10bn from the welfare budget within four years, targeting housing benefits for young people and payments for children, George Osborne told the Conservative Party...
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26 Jul 12
The £1.25bn of funding being channelled through the pupil premium is not necessarily going to be well spent, both the Sutton Trust education charity and Ofsted have warned.
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10 Jul 12
There is ‘not a snowball’s chance in hell’ that the government will reach the statutory target to eradicate child poverty by 2020, former Labour minister Alan Milburn said today.
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9 Jul 12
Working families with children have been dealt a ‘triple financial blow’ in the recession through cuts to tax credits and rising costs of childcare and transport, according to the Joseph Rowntree...
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14 Jun 12
The government wants to redefine the way it measures child poverty, Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith announced today.