Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether he has made an assessment of the potential impact of the ban on placing children under the age of 16 in unregulated accommodation on outcomes for those children in the 12 months since the introduction of that policy.

The department completed a child rights impact assessment and an equalities impact assessment banning the placement of under 16s in unregulated provision. Children of this age should be placed in children’s homes or in foster care.

The department will keep these under review as we move forward with wider reforms to introduce mandatory national standards and Ofsted registration and inspection requirements for providers of unregulated supported accommodation for 16 and 17-year-old looked-after children and care leavers.

Ofsted will continue to monitor placement practice through the inspecting local authority children’s services framework, and the department will also continue to collect and review data on local authority placements via the annual children looked after data return. Data from the period, since the regulations were laid in 2021, will be submitted to the department by local authorities in 2022. This data will be monitored and tracked by the department and will assist us to understand the impact on outcomes for the children placed in these settings.