Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the press release by Pause entitled Pause responds to Government’s plans for children’s social care, published on 11 May 2023, what assessment she has made of the potential implications for her policies of their recommendation on annual data collection on parents who have experienced the removal of more than one child from their care.

The department appreciates the need to improve the data available about children’s social care, including by making it more relevant to the experience of children, young people and families. That is why the department has published a data and digital strategy for children’s social care. This strategic approach will provide the opportunity to map and understand the data needs of the children’s social care sector as a whole and seek to address this over time. This will enable a better understanding of the system and support the planning and delivery of services. A link to the strategy can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/childrens-social-care-data-and-digital-strategy.

Existing statutory data is captured about the child and does not capture the complex nature of families such as, for example, where siblings to not live in the same family home. Addressing data gaps in children’s social care will be a long-term endeavour due to the need to agree data definitions and standards, as well as redesign local authority and departmental systems before rolling out nationally.