Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to page 27 of the Social Mobility Commission's report, Time for Change: an assessment of government policies on social mobility 1997-2017, published on 28 June 2017, what assessment she has made of the effect of a wide range of choices for parents on the uptake of vouchers for parenting programmes.

The Department for Education (DfE) funded the CANparent trial between April 2012 and March 2014 and trialled the use of vouchers for parenting programmes in three of the areas of the country. An evaluation of the DfE-funded trial found that:

While “voucher distributors and some other stakeholders spoke of parents being confused by the range of providers and types of courses on offer” by autumn 2013 “half (49%) of households that had received a voucher had already signed up to a class or were intending to sign up to a class”. The full evaluation of the DfE trial is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/canparent-trial-evaluation-final-report.

In April 2014, the Department of Health (DH) took responsibility for CANParent and ran a modified version of the trial (without a voucher element) for a third and final year. An evaluation of the DH-funded trial is available at: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/cedar/canuniversalparentingevaluation/trialevaluation/.