Asked by: Gill Furniss (Labour - Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the implications for his policies of the recommendations made by Missing Families in its report entitled All of us were broken, published 29 July 2019; and what steps he is taking to improve protections and support for children at risk of exploitation and their families.
Answered by Kemi Badenoch - President of the Board of Trade
The department welcomes Missing People’s work on this matter and, together with the Home Office, will give due consideration to the report’s recommendations.
To improve protections and support for children at risk of exploitation and their families, we have strengthened local safeguarding arrangements through the Children and Social Work Act (2017). We have placed a duty on safeguarding partners – the police, health and the local authority – to work together to make plans to keep children safe and be accountable for how well agencies work together to protect children from abuse and neglect in their local area.
These new arrangements to safeguard and promote the welfare of all children must be implemented by safeguarding partners by the end of September 2019. It will be for local determination regarding what the arrangements cover, but they must set out how all children, including those at risk of child criminal exploitation, will be kept safe. In order to ensure transparency regarding the activities undertaken, the safeguarding partners must publish a report, at least once in every 12-month period, setting out what they have done as a result of the arrangements and how effective these arrangements have been in practice.
In 2018 we revised the ‘Working Together to Safeguard Children’ and ‘Keeping Children Safe in Education’ statutory safeguarding guidance documents to reflect new and emerging risks of harm to children including county lines, criminal exploitation and other harms from outside the home.
The department is also funding a £2 million Tackling Child Exploitation support programme to provide evidence-based expertise, advice and practical support to safeguarding partners in local areas to develop an effective multi-agency response to extra-familial harms such as child sexual exploitation, child criminal exploitation and gang and drug involvement that exploit vulnerable children.
Asked by: Gill Furniss (Labour - Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of school uniforms being gender neutral.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The Government wants children to be able to attend a school of their parents’ choice wherever possible. No school uniform should leave pupils or their families feeling unable to apply to, or attend, a school of their choice.
The Department publishes guidance to help schools understand how the Equality Act affects them and how to fulfil their duties under the Act. This includes a duty on schools not to discriminate unlawfully due to the protected characteristics of sex and gender reassignment. As part of the government’s LGBT Action Plan, the Department has committed to updating this guidance and this will be published in due course. The LGBT Action Plan also contains a commitment that Government Equalities Office will work with the Equality and Human Rights Commission to publish comprehensive guidance for schools on how to support transgender pupils. The Equality Act guidance is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/equality-act-2010-advice-for-schools.
The Department already publishes guidance for schools on setting school uniform policies. The guidance sets out that a school should ensure that its school uniform policy is fair and reasonable for all its students and that policies should be flexible enough to accommodate the different needs of pupils.
In making decisions about its school uniform policy, and all other school policies, a school must have regard to its obligations under the Human Rights Act 1998, the Equality Act 2010 and the Public Sector Equality Duty. The school uniform guidance is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-uniform.
Asked by: Gill Furniss (Labour - Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if his Department will respond to the review entitled Bercow: Ten Years On, on provision for children and young people with speech, language and communication needs in England; and if he will make a statement.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
The government responded to the Bercow: Ten Years On review on 23 October 2018. A downloadable PDF copy of the government response can be found here: https://www.bercow10yearson.com/.
Asked by: Gill Furniss (Labour - Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many SEN places are available in (a) Sheffield, and (b) the UK.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
The information requested is not held centrally by the department.
The Children and Families Act (2014) requires local authorities to work with parents, young people and providers to keep the provision for children and young people with SEN and disabilities under review, including its sufficiency.
Asked by: Gill Furniss (Labour - Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment he has made of the (a) quality (b) availability and (c) funding of social care services for disabled children.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
The provision of services for disabled children rests with local authorities, who are best placed to assess the needs and priorities of the disabled children in their area.
The 2015 Spending Review made available more than £200 billion until 2020 for councils to deliver the local services their communities want to see, including social care services for disabled children.
The government is conducting a review of the relative needs and resources of local authorities that will develop a robust, up-to-date approach to distributing funding across all local authorities in England at Local Government Finance Settlements, including for children’s services. To inform the review, the Department for Education and the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government have jointly-commissioned a data research and collection project on cost and demand pressures for children’s services, to understand local authorities’ relative funding needs. We are working towards implementation in 2020/21, while keeping this date under review as our work progresses.
Asked by: Gill Furniss (Labour - Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether the Government is taking steps to ensure that menstrual wellbeing is part of the national school curriculum; and if he will make a statement.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The current Sex and Relationship Education Guidance 2000 sets out at 2.8 that schools should make adequate and sensitive arrangements to help pupils cope with menstruation and with requests for sanitary protection.
The Children and Social Work Act 2017 places a duty on the Secretary of State for Education to make Relationships Education, in primary schools, and Relationships and Sex Education, in secondary schools, compulsory in all schools. The Act provides a power for the Secretary of State to make Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education (PSHE), or elements therein, mandatory in all schools. The decision on PSHE is subject to careful consideration.
The Department recently conducted an engagement exercise to seek evidence on what should be included in these subjects. The Government will develop the regulations and statutory guidance for these subjects for public consultation. These subjects will continue to ensure that pupils are taught about menstruation, complementing what is already included in the National Curriculum for science.
Asked by: Gill Furniss (Labour - Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to tackle sexual violence and sexual harassment between pupils in schools.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
The hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough, may wish to be aware that on 14 December, we published dedicated advice on sexual violence and sexual harassment between children in schools and colleges. This explains what sexual violence and sexual harassment is, how to minimise the risks of it happening and how to manage reports of incidents.
At the same time as publishing the advice, we launched a consultation on proposals to update the department’s statutory safeguarding guidance, ‘Keeping Children Safe in Education’, from September 2018. The consultation closes on 22 February 2018.
As part of the consultation we are seeking views both on the content of the advice on sexual harassment and sexual violence and on the extent to which it should be reflected in the statutory guidance.
We plan to publish the revised ‘Keeping Children Safe in Education’ guidance, for information, early in the summer term 2018. This will give schools and colleges adequate time to review their policies and procedures and make any changes necessary to meet the requirements before the guidance comes into force in September 2018.
Asked by: Gill Furniss (Labour - Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment her Department has made of the effect of changes to school funding on schools in Sheffield.
Answered by Nick Gibb
Our proposals for funding reform will mean that schools and local authority areas will, for the first time, receive a consistent and fair share of the schools budget, so that they can give every child the opportunity to reach their full potential.
For Sheffield local authority, the proposals would mean an increase in schools funding of 4.6%. On funding for pupils with high needs, Sheffield local authority would see an increase of 13.0%.
The current consultation is open until 22 March, and we are keen to hear views from as many schools, governors, local authorities and parents as possible. We will publish our response to the consultation, including details of representations received, in due course.