Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to ensure disabled children can access social care support.

This government is taking forward significant reform of children’s social care, with the aim to rebalance the system towards earlier intervention and ensure that all children and families can access the right help at the point of need, rather than needing to meet a particular threshold. This is particularly the case for children with disabilities, whose need is potentially different from others who may require help and support from children’s social care. Disabled children may require support for the entirety of their childhood and sit across children’s social care, education and health, and their support offer should be adjusted to reflect this.

To that end, on Thursday 20 March, I announced the launch of the national Families First Partnership Programme, including the publication of the Families First Programme guide. The guide has been produced to support safeguarding partnerships across England implement Family Help and multi-agency child protection reforms and make greater use of Family Group Decision Making. The guide can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/families-first-partnership-programme.

The programme is backed by over £500 million of investment in the 2025/26 financial year, made available through England’s final local government finance settlement (LGFS) for the 2025/26 financial year. This doubles direct investment into preventative support, ensuring access to support at the earliest opportunity, which over time, we expect to safely reduce the number of looked after children, keeping more families together. More information on the LGFS can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/final-local-government-finance-settlement-england-2025-to-2026.

Programmes delivered by local government over many years have paved the way for these reforms, including evidence from the Supporting Families, and Strengthening Families, Protecting Children programmes. We will also take forward lessons so far from the ten local areas part of the Families First for Children Pathfinder. Best practice for improving the support provided to disabled children includes appointing special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) specialist lead practitioners to lead work with families and recruiting SEND expertise into local authorities’ ‘front doors’ to ensure timely and effective decision making and promote access to services at the earliest opportunity.