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Children: Laming Report

My Lords, the noble Baroness asks wise questions. We have to be clear that there needs to be a balance between support and challenge. Where does service improvement come from if it is not from challenge? It is important that professionals feel free to contribute to serious case reviews, so that their issues and experience can be fed back into service improvement and we have the right mechanism for it. However, support must come at every level in the system. The noble Lord, Lord Laming, has highlighted the need for social workers to have much better leadership in their local practice through better supervision and better management. That means a systematic improvement in the quality of social work training, whether it is initial training in the higher education sector or ongoing professional development. It is also about supporting social workers with experience and expertise to stay in practice, which we are very committed to doing.