Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what support his Department provides for unaccompanied child refugees when they arrive in the UK.

Local authorities are under a statutory obligation to provide accommodation for unaccompanied children who arrive in their area. This means that they become looked after children and should be safeguarded and have their welfare promoted in the same way as any other looked after child. To help support this, the government has revised the ‘Statutory guidance on the care of unaccompanied migrant children and child victims of modern slavery’, which was published 1 November 2017: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/care-of-unaccompanied-and-trafficked-children.

The government recognises that unaccompanied asylum seeking and refugee children can be some of the most vulnerable in our society. The government’s vision and additional commitment to caring for these children is set out in the strategy for ‘Safeguarding unaccompanied asylum seeking and refugee children’, published 1 November 2017: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/safeguarding-unaccompanied-asylum-seeking-and-refugee-children.