Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, pursuant to the Answer of 28 January 2019 to Question 211786 on Children: Social Services, which local authority requested exemption from statutory guidance; from what statutory guidance that local authority requested exemption; and for what reason that request was refused.

In June 2018, Hackney wrote to the department asking for dispensation from ‘Working Together to Safeguard Children 2015’ in relation to child protection conferences. They wanted to explore establishing an alternative process with a specific cohort of young people where the risk of harm was derived from outside of their family, but their parents were engaged with services. The department wrote back to say, as set out in ‘Working Together to Safeguard Children 2018’, that the statutory guidance should be compiled with unless exceptional circumstances arise.