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Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

I warmly thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Bolton, for bringing this proposal back. These children are often very powerless in their early lives within their families, so their best advocate should be their social worker. That social worker should be given the professional development and support to enable them to be the most effective and efficient advocate for each child in their care. However, that aim is undermined if the individual social worker changes frequently, so this is an important point to hammer home and get sorted out. I also support my noble friend Lady Howarth in her point about ensuring that detailed information about rates of staff turnover is published as widely as possible. Guidance on this issue should be looked at, so that if anything can be done to improve the situation, it certainly should be done. Moreover, I wonder whether anything could be done through joint area reviews, thus ensuring that inspections take into consideration the turnover rate of social workers for children, or possibly through a thematic review of the provision for children. I was grateful for a letter from the chief inspector of Ofsted on my previous questions about the role of the inspectorates. There might be a role for them here in identifying our failures in practice and in providing support to improve and raise standards. We have often discussed the model used in Barnet of smaller social work teams with new roles. This keeps experienced people at the front line, supporting their newer colleagues, and thereby improving stability in the workforce. I hope the Minister will feel able to give the amendment some support and I look forward to his response on this question.