Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what funding programmes are in place to support (a) early intervention for children with additional needs and (b) other aspects of nurture care.

Children’s services, including for meeting additional needs, nurture and care, are delivered locally. Statutory guidance ‘Working Together to Safeguard Children’ is clear that local areas should have a comprehensive range of effective, evidence-based services in place to address assessed needs early. The 2015 Spending Review made available more than £200 billion until 2020 for councils to deliver local services, including children’s services. Through the local government finance settlement, local government has been given access to £45.1 billion in 2018-19 and £45.6 billion in 2019-20. This is an overall increase since 2017-18 of £1.3 billion.

In addition, the Department for Education’s National Funding Formula has an additional needs factor, directing more funding to local authorities with more need. Local authorities also receive high needs funding, which supports educational provision up-to age 25. High needs funding has risen by £1 billion since 2013 and will be over £6 billion next year.

Beyond these funding streams, across government, there are a wide range of programmes underway to address the root causes of children’s needs early. This includes:

- £8 million funding for supporting children affected by domestic abuse.

- £200 million youth endowment fund preventing young people being drawn into serious violence.

- £1.4 billion investment to transform children and young people’s mental health services from 2015/16 to 2019/20, with £300 million proposals outlined in the 'Transforming children and young people’s mental health provision: a green paper (2017)' in addition to this.

- £920 million committed to the Troubled Families Programme, which aims to achieve significant and sustained improvement for up to 400,000 families with multiple, high-cost problems by 2020.

In meeting other additional needs such as special education needs and disabilities (SEND), there are a range of measures put in place to ensure that local areas can put the right support in place for children and their families to access early education. Our disability access fund is worth £615 per eligible child per year, and there is a requirement that local authorities establish a SEND Inclusion Fund for three and four year olds, to ensure children with SEND get the best from the free childcare entitlements. Since 2014, we have invested £391 million for local areas to implement SEND reforms.

Funding for children’s social care is an unringfenced part of the wider local government finance settlement, to give local authorities the flexibility to focus on locally determined priorities as well as meeting statutory responsibilities. Local authorities used this flexibility to increase spending on children and young people’s services to around £9.2 billion in 2016-17.

The department has also invested £200 million in our Innovation Programme, so councils and others have support to trial ways to reform services to be more effective. This includes strands focused on children at the edge of Children in Need services and on reducing children entering care. This is also an early priority for the What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care, which is funded to make a positive difference to practice and outcomes for children and families by improving the quality and use of evidence.