Baroness Young of Hornsey OBE led a meeting between Rob Macpherson MBE, the lead for children looked after, and ACRCG on 26 February 2019 to follow up the work done by participants at the Seminar at the House of Lords.
The DfE agreed in principle to the concept of Standards to mark a threshold of quality of services for all adult care leavers who ask to see their case records and they will support work we do to devise these. The Department’s remit is for care leavers up to 25 years and they agreed to support us in making links with other relevant government departments to achieve across government support for standards.
The DfE is due to revisit the Transition to Adulthood statutory guidance [which includes the guidance on access to records] and will see how to strengthen this and to improve links between the Ofsted inspection process of LA services and the guidance, particularly looking at the quality of the process to support care leavers now and the quality of care records for future care leavers.
This will link to the work the DfE is doing on the Care Leavers’ Covenant and the new duty on local authorities to set out their offer of services available to care leavers. We believe this was a successful recognition of the work done by participants in November and we are now working on draft standards to circulate for consideration.
