Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the change in the number of children in care since 2010.

Information on the number of children in care since 2010 is published in table H1 of the annual statistical release ‘Children looked after in England including adoption: 2018 to 2019’, which is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/children-looked-after-in-england-including-adoption-2018-to-2019.

The drivers of demand are complex. A sector-led ‘Care Crisis Review’ in 2018 found that there are many inter-linked factors contributing to the rise in care proceedings and children entering care. We are funding a What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care whose first research priority is to look at what works in safely reducing the need for children to enter care.

The government is committed to supporting children in care and wants all looked-after children to have a secure, stable and loving family environment to support them through childhood and beyond. In December, we announced an additional £45 million for the adoption support fund to reduce the number of children waiting for a permanent home and to strengthen relationships with their adoptive parents. We are also providing councils with an additional £1 billion for adults and children’s social care in every year of this Parliament. As set out in the manifesto, we are committed to undertaking a review of the care system. This review will allow us to go even further and to ensure that all care placements and settings provide children and young people with the support they need.

Since 2010 we have improved support for children in care, and have invested funding and support in local authorities in a range of areas including:

• £200 million in the Innovation Programme, testing new approaches in children’s social care, including targeted support for looked after children
• established the What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care to drive improvement and ensure that innovation and best practice are at the heart of local authority social work
• introduced the Corporate Parenting Principles through the Children and Social Work Act 2017, for the first time setting out how local authorities can be a good ‘corporate parent’
• put in place measures such as the local authority Virtual School Head, giving looked-after children top priority in school admissions and extra funding to meet their needs through the Pupil Premium Plus, worth £2,300 per child
• invested £1 million to pilot high quality mental health assessments for children on entry to local authority care

This is in addition to the commitments we have made to improve the lives of children in residential and foster care, through our strategies published in 2016 and 2018.