Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment his Department has made of the effectiveness of contextual safeguarding.

Through the children’s social care Innovation Programme, the Department for Education is funding the London Borough of Hackney up to £2 million to test “contextual safeguarding theory”. This approach creates a system in which practitioners can appropriately assess and intervene when risk of harm comes from beyond an adolescent’s family. The project is being externally evaluated and we expect the final report in March 2020.