Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what proportion of foster carers and support workers of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children have received the training on caring for those children that was commissioned to be delivered by ECPAT(UK) and the Refugee Council since 2016 in each local authority area.

Between November 2016 and February 2019, ECPAT(UK) and the Refugee Council have trained 2,086 foster carers and support workers on caring for the specialist safeguarding needs of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. The training is equipping these carers with the skills they need to identify when a child is at risk of going missing to be onwards trafficked, of being exploited for economic, sexual, and criminal exploitation or of being exposed to radicalisation.

The information requested on the number of foster carers or support workers is not held centrally so we are unable to provide this as a proportion of the total foster carers and support workers.

Since 2016, recipients of the training have generally reported high levels of satisfaction with its quality. For the current tranche of training, 99% of those trained who provided feedback rated the training ‘good’ or ‘excellent’.