Asked by: David Simmonds (Conservative - Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether he has made a recent assessment of the potential impact of the requirement for providers of supported accommodation for 16 and 17 year olds to register with Ofsted on the sufficiency of placements.
Answered by Kelly Tolhurst
Local authorities have a statutory duty to make sure there is sufficient provision in their area to meet the needs of children in their care. The government is supporting local authorities to meet their statutory duty by investing £259 million capital funding to maintain capacity and expand provision in both secure and open children’s homes. This will provide high-quality safe homes for some of the most vulnerable children and young people. This will support local authorities to develop the provision they need locally, that may not be met in the private market.
The government will invest over £142 million across the next three years to support local authorities, providers, and Ofsted to implement mandatory national standards, and Ofsted registration and inspection for currently unregulated supported accommodation providers who accommodate 16 and 17-year-old looked-after children and care leavers.
The department expects the national standards to become mandatory from autumn 2023, following a minimum six-month registration window, which will enable providers to register before the standards come into force, reducing any potential disruption or sufficiency challenges for local authorities. We will invest up to £1.3 million to support providers to prepare for the reforms.
The department will complete the required impact assessments ahead of laying the regulations, which will bring the new regime into effect.
Asked by: David Simmonds (Conservative - Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many under-16s are currently placed in unregulated accommodation compared to prior to when the ban on that practice came into force on 9 September 2021.
Answered by Kelly Tolhurst
On 31 March 2021, 65 looked-after children aged under 16 were placed in unregulated accommodation. Information for the reporting year 2021/22 will not be available until November 2022.
Asked by: David Simmonds (Conservative - Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to help ensure schools co-operate with local safeguarding arrangements.
Answered by Robin Walker
Safeguarding partners are under a statutory duty to safeguard and promote the wellbeing of all children in a local area. All three safeguarding partners have equal and joint responsibility for local safeguarding arrangements and must set out how they will work together and with any relevant agencies. Relevant agencies must act in accordance with those arrangements.
Schools, colleges and other educational providers have a pivotal role to play in safeguarding children and promoting their welfare. The safeguarding partners should make arrangements to allow all schools (including multi academy trusts), colleges and other educational providers in the local area to be fully engaged, involved, and included in the new safeguarding arrangements. It is expected that local safeguarding partners will name schools, colleges and other educational providers as relevant agencies and will reach their own conclusions on how best locally to achieve the active engagement of individual institutions in a meaningful way. Once designated as a relevant agency, schools and colleges, and other educational providers, in the same way as other relevant agencies, are under a statutory duty to co-operate with the published arrangements.
Following the Ofsted review of sexual abuse in schools and colleges in June 2021, Ministers from the Department for Education, Home Office, and Department of Health and Social Care wrote to all 135 all safeguarding partners to request that they review their arrangements with schools, colleges, and education providers and set out their local offer to education.
We have also held a series of national events with safeguarding partners, education providers, and other government departments to understand emerging practice and barriers to effective working. These will form part of a wider programme of work to ensure that the arrangements that have been put in place are being utilised to their fullest by both safeguarding partners, and schools and colleges.
Asked by: David Simmonds (Conservative - Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to protect children who have been separated from parents and family on arrival in the UK.
Answered by Will Quince
The department takes the welfare of all unaccompanied children extremely seriously and is committed to ensuring they are properly safeguarded. Statutory duties placed on the local authority in respect of unaccompanied children will apply to any child arriving in the UK who has been separated from their parents and family.
In England Section 17 of the Children Act 1989 (CA89) imposes a general duty on local authorities to safeguard and promote the welfare of ‘children in need’ in their area. Section 20 CA89 imposes a duty to accommodate children in need if they meet the relevant criteria.
Generally, once a child has been accommodated by a local authority continuously for more than 24 hours, they become a looked after child and should be safeguarded and have their welfare promoted in the same way as any other looked after child, taking account of their particular needs. Any child separated from their parents and family would likely remain accommodated by the local authority, until such time as they can be re-united when possible and appropriate.
Asked by: David Simmonds (Conservative - Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether his Department holds data on the impact of the extension of free school meals to children in families with no recourse to public funds on the educational attainment of those children.
Answered by Will Quince
The work that has been done on reviewing the relationship between the no resource to public funds (NRPF) condition, and access to free school meals (FSM) will not be published.
FSM eligibility will be extended to children from all groups with NRPF from the start of the summer term, with guidance for schools being published shortly. Information on the number of children who received a free meal, and attracted pupil premium funding under the temporary extension of free school meal eligibility to some NRPF households in the 2021/2022 financial year can be found in the third document here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pupil-premium-allocations-and-conditions-of-grant-2021-to-2022.
Asked by: David Simmonds (Conservative - Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if he will publish the review of free school meals to children from families with no recourse to public funds.
Answered by Will Quince
The work that has been done on reviewing the relationship between the no resource to public funds (NRPF) condition, and access to free school meals (FSM) will not be published.
FSM eligibility will be extended to children from all groups with NRPF from the start of the summer term, with guidance for schools being published shortly. Information on the number of children who received a free meal, and attracted pupil premium funding under the temporary extension of free school meal eligibility to some NRPF households in the 2021/2022 financial year can be found in the third document here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pupil-premium-allocations-and-conditions-of-grant-2021-to-2022.