Children's Services
There’s no bigger priority than making Manchester’s children safe and ready to reach their full potential. So the services that support them must be effective and efficient. We agreed an extra £10.7m investmentin the e year for 2020/21 to meet the care needs of children and young people. The need and complexity challenging these services will increase in 2020/21 and we'll need additional resources for existing pressures, deepening partnerships and recruiting and developing the skilled, dedicated staff needed for this vital work.
In 2020/21 we will invest a total of £130.320million on our Children’s and Education services – a £9.888million increase on the previous year, including:
- £2.342m for children in care
- £950,000 to support care leavers
- £95,000 for adoption
- £390,000 supporting families
- £500,000 for social work experts
- £200,000 supporting foster families
- £900,000 for legal and court costs
- £250,000 for early years centres
- £134,000 for school transport
- £80,000 for breaks for foster families
- £350,000 for educational psychology
- £145,000 for planning and ordering services.
This extra spending would support the total £130.320m consisting of:
- £16.383m for Education services
- £109.477m for Children’s and safeguarding services
- £4.460m for running and managing Education and Children’s services.
We’ll use a social care grant increase of £6m over the next two years to help fund this, with £1.7m being carried forward for ongoing costs of care in 2021/22. However, we’ll need to find future savings from reviewing contracts, using less residential and out-of-the-area care, more income from schools, and better planning and buying of fostering services. We’ll also continue to support families earlier and work better with our partners to prevent future problems occurring.
See the full Children and Education Services budget