Found: Many families/disadvantaged pupils, who are deemed by a number of professionals to be in need of

Found: Access to Free School Meals is a vital lifeline for many families.

Found: This is hugely bene Þcial and advantageous to home education families.

Found: social security have been most felt by children in lone parent families; larger families and young families

Found: Blowing legislation and where they do assert their rights, do so at great costs to themselves and the families

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask His Majesty's Government what is the breakdown of spending by local authorities of Reducing Parental Conflict grants, in terms of matters such as internal human and other resources, training, and direct delivery to parents; and what are local evaluations showing is the impact of the way the grant is allocated locally.

Answered by Viscount Younger of Leckie - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)

This phase of the Reducing Parental Conflict (RPC) programme (2022-25) focuses on supporting and funding Local Authorities (LAs) to integrate RPC into their family help offer. As such, the programme does not directly put parents through RPC interventions, these decisions are instead taken at a local level.

LAs receive RPC funding through the RPC Local Grant, which makes up to £19m available from 2022-25. In the first year of grant funding, LAs have directly supported around 18,000 parents, and over 30,000 training places for staff. Further details on LA breakdowns of grant funding have been appended to the end of this PQ.

In the first year of the RPC Local Grant, LAs had spent £159,000 of their Local Grant funding to undertake evaluation activities. As we are at the start of the second year of a three-year grant process, this work is ongoing. There are however positive findings emerging from local evaluation work. For instance, through our partnered working with ‘Foundations’, these have been published on their website.

LAs are not required to provide data on whether those parents are together or separating/separated. The forthcoming Reducing Parental Conflict evaluation reports, announced on 19th July, will provide further detail on the effects of support on the relationships between intact parents and separating/separated parents.

To Note:

The information in this PQ is derived from internal management information and is not quality assured to Official Statistics standards.

As this is ongoing Management Information, derived from 134 LAs, small amounts of additional resource which LAs have committed beyond their Grant Funding has not been disaggregated from the figures, as such totals may slightly exceed overall allocation in some places and the final reported figures will differ.

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask His Majesty's Government how many parents have been directly supported since the start of phase two of the Reducing Parental Conflict programme through tested interventions that are proven to help parents who (1) want to stay together, and (2) are separating or separated.

Answered by Viscount Younger of Leckie - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)

This phase of the Reducing Parental Conflict (RPC) programme (2022-25) focuses on supporting and funding Local Authorities (LAs) to integrate RPC into their family help offer. As such, the programme does not directly put parents through RPC interventions, these decisions are instead taken at a local level.

LAs receive RPC funding through the RPC Local Grant, which makes up to £19m available from 2022-25. In the first year of grant funding, LAs have directly supported around 18,000 parents, and over 30,000 training places for staff. Further details on LA breakdowns of grant funding have been appended to the end of this PQ.

In the first year of the RPC Local Grant, LAs had spent £159,000 of their Local Grant funding to undertake evaluation activities. As we are at the start of the second year of a three-year grant process, this work is ongoing. There are however positive findings emerging from local evaluation work. For instance, through our partnered working with ‘Foundations’, these have been published on their website.

LAs are not required to provide data on whether those parents are together or separating/separated. The forthcoming Reducing Parental Conflict evaluation reports, announced on 19th July, will provide further detail on the effects of support on the relationships between intact parents and separating/separated parents.

To Note:

The information in this PQ is derived from internal management information and is not quality assured to Official Statistics standards.

As this is ongoing Management Information, derived from 134 LAs, small amounts of additional resource which LAs have committed beyond their Grant Funding has not been disaggregated from the figures, as such totals may slightly exceed overall allocation in some places and the final reported figures will differ.

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment his Department has made of the effectiveness of the Reducing Parental Conflict programme in supporting at-risk children of alcohol dependent parents.

Answered by Mims Davies - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)

The Reducing Parental Conflict programme aims to improve child outcomes by reducing parental conflict that is frequent, intense and unresolved.

In 2018 the DWP and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) launched the Children of Alcohol Dependent Parents (CADeP) programme. This included funding of £5.7 million for 9 areas (13 local authorities), to reduce parental conflict alongside improving existing systems of treatment for parents with alcohol dependency.

To ensure that the learning from the programme was shared, DHSC commissioned an independent evaluation of the innovation fund. This evaluation has been published and can be found at Evaluation of the Children of Alcohol Dependent Parents programme innovation fund: full report - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk).

The following findings of the evaluation were of particular interest to DWP in relation to the RPC elements of this programme:

• There were improvements in the timely identification of alcohol dependent parents and their children, and improved integration and quality of local systems and interventions, especially between substance misuse services and children’s services.
• Positive improvement to family dynamics where parents gave accounts of their children being happier following whole-family interventions delivered by the RPC programme.
• Positive feedback from children who participated in whole-family interventions. RPC practitioners were successful in building trust and confidence amongst at-risk children of alcohol dependent parents.

The current phase of the Reducing Parental Conflict programme runs between 2022 and 2025, with up to £19 million to fund training, delivery of support, co-ordination and evaluation. This supports Local Authorities to choose activity that best suits local need.

This government remains committed to strengthening the support available to children and families, working with local authorities through government funded programmes including Reducing Parental Conflict, Supporting Families and Family Hubs /Start for Life.

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how much funding his Department has provided to the Reducing Parental Conflict programme in each local authority.

Answered by Mims Davies - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)

Grants for Local Authorities have been one strand of the Reducing Parental Conflict programme since its inception in 2018.

This strand has provided funding of £27.6 million to individual Local Authorities as set out in the attached information.