Asked by: Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government when the most recent review was undertaken of the use made by local authorities of their duty under section 10(1) of the Children Act 2004 (Co-operation to improve well-being), and of the response of relevant partners listed under section 10(4)(fa) to (fd); and what conclusions were reached.
Answered by Baroness Smith of Malvern - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
The department has not undertaken a review of the use made by local authorities of their duty under section 10(1) of the Children Act 2004 (Co-operation to improve well-being), or of the response of relevant partners listed under section 10(4)(fa) to (fd).
Evidence is clear that multi-agency and multi-disciplinary support is essential to keep children safe at home with their family. The department is therefore testing stronger multi-agency approaches to support families, through the £45 million Families First for Children Pathfinder and Family Networks Pilot. This will help families overcome challenges, stay together and thrive whilst keeping children safe. This includes establishing new multi-agency child protection teams and lead child protection practitioners.
In November, the department published its ambitious, wide-ranging plans in ‘Keeping children safe, helping families thrive’, setting the wheels in motion to break the cycle of crisis intervention and rebalance the system back towards earlier help for families. In December, we introduced the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. This is a landmark piece of legislation, introducing a series of measures with a focus on delivering a joined-up system to stop vulnerable children falling through cracks in services.
Asked by: Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Defence:
To ask His Majesty's Government what plans they have to mark the 25th anniversary of the lifting of the LGBT+ ban in the armed forces.
Answered by Lord Coaker - Minister of State (Ministry of Defence)
To commemorate this historic milestone, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) and Fighting with Pride held events for both Serving personnel and veterans over the weekend of 12 January and have plans to host more throughout 2025.
During the weekend of 12 January, the design for the LGBT+ Armed Forces Community Memorial was announced at an evening reception. The RAF Church St Clement Danes held a service of commemoration to mark the 25th anniversary and an evening reception with Ministers and all three Service Chiefs was held. Additionally, the pride flag was proudly flown from MOD Main Building throughout the weekend.
Throughout the rest of 2025 all three Services have planned 25th Anniversary Dinners; Defence and veterans will be participating in various Pride events; and the official unveiling of the LGBT Armed Forces Community Memorial at the National Arboretum will be marked by an event.
Asked by: Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to improve access to higher education and employment opportunities for young carers.
Answered by Baroness Smith of Malvern - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
Opportunity should be available to all but too many people across our country do not get the chance to succeed. The department will act to address the persistent gaps for different groups, including young carers, and break down the barriers to opportunity.
The department is committed to ensuring that all young people have equitable access to work experience opportunities, including young carers. The Youth Guarantee will ensure that every young person aged 18 to 21 who needs it is supported in accessing further learning or receives help to get a job or an apprenticeship.
The department’s ambition is to offer a guarantee of two weeks’ worth of high quality work experience to all young people over the course of their secondary education, irrespective of their background. This will open doors to a wider range of employers and businesses, giving young people greater insight into the labour market, while developing relevant skills for work. It will also help young people make informed decisions about their next steps and support their future employment prospects.
The department’s delivery partner, The Careers and Enterprise Company, is piloting the delivery of the work experience guarantee. This includes testing a ringfenced disadvantage premium to assist schools with the costs of work experience, such as transportation, and the development of a virtual work experience platform to improve the accessibility of opportunities. Piloting work began in October 2024, with end of pilot reporting in August 2025.
Higher education (HE) plays an important role in ensuring that individuals gain the skills they need to succeed in life and the department will support the aspiration of every person who meets the requirements and wants to pursue this, regardless of their background.
All HE providers registered with the Office for Students (OfS) that intend to charge higher level tuition fees are required to have an access and participation plan approved by the OfS. These plans articulate how providers will improve equality of opportunity for underrepresented groups. In creating their plans, providers should consider the Equality of Opportunity Risk Register, which details 12 key sector risks across the student lifecycle and the student groups most likely to experience these, including young carers.
Whilst many HE providers have demonstrated positive examples of supporting young carers, including targeted outreach and on course bursaries and mentoring, the department is keen to see the sector go further. By summer, the department will set out its plan for HE reform, and we expect providers to play an even stronger role in improving access and outcomes for all disadvantaged students, including young carers.
Asked by: Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to help local authorities and schools regularly to monitor and support the attendance of young carers.
Answered by Baroness Smith of Malvern - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
This government is committed to breaking down the barriers to opportunity for all young people. This includes young carers, who provide a critical role caring for their loved ones but are all too often hidden from view.
The department’s expectations of local authorities and schools are set out in the ‘Working together to improve school attendance’ guidance, which was made statutory on 19 August 2024. The ‘support first’ ethos of the attendance guidance is that pupils and families, including young carers, should, where appropriate, receive holistic, whole-family support to help them overcome any barriers to attendance they are facing. This includes holding regular meetings with the families of pupils whom the school, and/or local authority, consider to be vulnerable.
Young carers are also now part of the school census, which will improve their visibility in the school system, allowing schools to better identify and support them.
Furthermore, Ofsted has committed to developing and consulting upon a revised schools’ inspection framework for the next academic year. This will support the new school report card. A consultation on the framework and report card is scheduled to launch early in the new year, and the department and Ofsted are engaging closely to take this forward. The consultation will set out proposals for how Ofsted will evaluate how schools are approaching the twin issues of attendance and inclusion in order to support the government’s mission to ensure that all children, including young carers, can achieve and thrive at school.
The children’s social care national framework, issued in December 2023, is statutory guidance for local authorities. It provides clarity on the outcomes that leaders and practitioners should achieve when supporting children, young people, and families, including in the identification and assessment of support for young carers.
Asked by: Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government how many sessions each local authority-maintained school and each Academy school provided education in the 2022–23 school year; and what was the proportion of Academies that provided fewer than 380 sessions in that year.
Answered by Baroness Smith of Malvern - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
The information requested is not held centrally.
Under the Education (School Day and School Year) (England) Regulations 1999, local authority-maintained schools are required to meet for at least 380 sessions or 190 days in each school year.
Academies are not bound by these regulations. The length of the school year is the responsibility of the academy trust.
Asked by: Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government, for each Academy Order made between 1 January 2024 and 30 November 2024 under section 4(A1) of the Academies Act 2010, whether they will list (1) the name of the school, (2) the school's unique reference number (URN), (3) the date of the order, (4) the date on which the Academy was established, if applicable, and the Academy's URN, (5) the reason for revocation, if applicable, and the date of revocation, and (6) where the Order is in place, whether revocation is being considered; and if not, what plans there are for academisation and when, including the name of the sponsor.
Answered by Baroness Smith of Malvern - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
Between 1 January and 30 November 2024, 48 schools were issued an academy order under section 4(A1) of the Academies Act 2010. The attached spreadsheet details the school name, URN, the date of the academy order was issued, the current status, the date and reason for revocation (where applicable) and any subsequent information relating to potential revocation.
Asked by: Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what investment has been made in secondary school libraries in England over the past fifteen years.
Answered by Baroness Smith of Malvern - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
School libraries complement public libraries by giving pupils access to a range of books and other kinds of texts, both in and out of school.
It is for individual schools to decide how best to provide and maintain a library service for their pupils, including whether to employ a qualified librarian, and the department gives headteachers autonomy to decide how best to spend the core schools funding that is allocated to them by the department. Given this autonomy, the department does not collect information on the number of school libraries or school librarians.
The government’s reading framework offers non-statutory guidance for teachers and school leaders, including helpful guidance for schools on how to organise their school library, book corner or book stock to make reading accessible and attractive to readers.
Asked by: Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government how many school libraries and school librarians there are in England; and how those figures compare with the figures for 2010.
Answered by Baroness Smith of Malvern - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
School libraries complement public libraries by giving pupils access to a range of books and other kinds of texts, both in and out of school.
It is for individual schools to decide how best to provide and maintain a library service for their pupils, including whether to employ a qualified librarian, and the department gives headteachers autonomy to decide how best to spend the core schools funding that is allocated to them by the department. Given this autonomy, the department does not collect information on the number of school libraries or school librarians.
The government’s reading framework offers non-statutory guidance for teachers and school leaders, including helpful guidance for schools on how to organise their school library, book corner or book stock to make reading accessible and attractive to readers.
Asked by: Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to encourage businesses to use digital technology in complying with modern slavery legislation.
Answered by Lord Hanson of Flint - Minister of State (Home Office)
This government is committed to tackling modern slavery, ensuring that victims are provided with the support they need to begin rebuilding their lives and that those responsible are prosecuted. We recognise the valuable role that digital tools can play in supporting businesses to assess and manage this risk.
We encourage industry-led innovation to identify and manage modern slavery risks and comply with the reporting requirements under S54 of the Modern Slavery Act. The Tech Against Trafficking workstream under the Global Business Coalition Against Human Trafficking is an excellent example of this, where businesses have put competition aside to work together on digital tools to help eradicate modern slavery.
Under Section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015, commercial businesses who operate in the UK and have a turnover of £36m or more must report annually on the steps they have taken to prevent modern slavery in their operations and supply chains. The Home Office published statutory guidance in 2015 to support businesses to draft high quality modern slavery statements and we are currently working with a diverse group of stakeholders to update this.
We encourage businesses to upload their modern slavery statements to the online modern slavery statement registry. This is a powerful tool for transparency, bringing together modern slavery statements into one place on GOV.UK. The registry now hosts over 16,400 modern slavery statements and over the last year there have been an average of 22,500 public searches for the registry every month. We are currently developing a public facing data dashboard that will support businesses and members of the public to analyse the data held on the registry in more detail.
Asked by: Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Business and Trade:
To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the University of Manchester article, "Modern slavery and digital technology in ‘Fast Fashion’: the transparency dividend", published on 8 July, and, in particular, the need for businesses to avoid so-called ‘tech-washing’ and associated human rights abuses.
Answered by Baroness Jones of Whitchurch
The Government expects UK businesses to undertake due diligence so that human rights issues are considered in their operations and supply chain relationships, in line with the OECD Guidelines on Responsible Business Conduct and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. This Government will continue to assess and monitor the effectiveness of the UK’s existing measures, alongside the impacts of new tools that are emerging to ensure we can best promote responsible business practices, including in the fashion sector.
Under Section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015, commercial businesses who operate in the UK with a turnover of £36 million or more must make an annual statement on the steps they have taken to prevent modern slavery in their supply chains.