rent about the support we provide to all of our most disadvantaged and vulnerable children. 4 This government is on a mission to create a new era of opportunity and a fairer society for everybody. As the Minister for Children and Families I am proud to be part of this mission, which is personal to me. I look forward to working alongside partners and stakeholders, listening to the voices of children and young people who experience social care, to help make their lives better. Janet Daby MP Minister for Children and Families 5 Introduction The Children’s Social Care Dashboard (the “Dashboard”) and the Children’s Social Care National Framework are central to our ambition to set greater national direction for children’s social care, and to build a system that can continually learn and improve. In December 2023, under the previous government, the department published its Children’s Social Care Data and Digital Strategy, outlining how data can support and enable local authorities to deliver children’s social care services. It sets out the ambition to develop a system that effectively shares children’s social care data to provide necessary insights to those who need it, when they need it, building public trust in data use. The Dashboard supports that ambition, working to achieve the strategic objective of improving the data we collect, share, and use, by providing timely analysis and insights that inform evidence-based decisions and actions. The National Framework brings together the purpose of local authority children’s social care, the principles by which children, young people and families should be supported, the enablers that should be in place so that the system is effective, and the outcomes that should be achieved so that children and young people can grow up to thrive