Asked by: Lord Laming (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to improve the rate of adoption of children in care, when adoption is in the child’s best interests.
Answered by Baroness Barran
As set out in the department’s Adoption Strategy: Achieving Excellence Everywhere, we are committed to improving the matching of approved adopters with children waiting to be found new homes. The strategy can be found attached.
£5 million has been committed for 2022 to 2025 to support Regional Adoption Agency Leaders to focus specifically on reducing the number of children who wait over 18 months for homes from the time of a court placement order being given. Some progress has already been made. This number has fallen from 390 in March 2020 to 240 in September 2022, but the department wants to see further and faster progress.
In addition, government funded recruitment campaigns are helping to provide a greater sufficiency of adopters, as well as targeted campaigns with a focus on recruiting adopters who are more likely to give a loving home to the children who wait the longest to be adopted.
Asked by: Lord Laming (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to reduce persistent truanting in schools.
Answered by Baroness Barran
The government has a comprehensive attendance strategy to ensure that absence is minimised. The department has recently published guidance setting out how we expect schools, trusts and local authorities to work together to improve attendance, which is available in the attached document.
The guidance is clear that schools should develop and maintain a whole school culture that promotes the benefits of high attendance, have a clear school attendance policy, and have effective day to day processes in place to follow-up absence.
The guidance sets out that schools are expected to use attendance data to identify patterns of poor attendance (at individual and cohort level) as soon as possible so that all parties can work together to resolve them before they become entrenched. To help schools to do this, the department has recently launched new functionality which allows mainstream schools that are sharing daily attendance data to compare attendance with other schools within their own local authority. This can be seen under the ‘compare your attendance tab’ via GOV.UK’s ‘View your education data’ site at: https://viewyourdata.education.gov.uk/. The tool will help schools to identify strengths and priorities and signpost to additional guidance and support.
The department has employed expert attendance advisers who are playing an important role working closely with local authorities and a number of multi-academy trusts with higher levels of persistent absence to review their current practice and support them to develop plans to improve. The department has also recently launched a £2.32 million attendance mentor pilot to deliver intensive one-to-one support to a group of persistently and severely absent pupils. The pilot will run for three years supporting a total of 1,665 pupils. The findings from this pilot should enable schools, trusts, and local authorities to address persistent and severe absence more effectively.
My right hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Education, has also established an Alliance of national leaders from education, children’s social care and other relevant services to work together to raise school attendance and reduce persistent absence. Schools and local authorities can also use a range of measures to provide support for and/or sanctions against parents when their child’s irregular attendance in school becomes a problem. These measures are used to reinforce parents’ responsibilities and to support them in improving their child’s attendance at school.
Asked by: Lord Laming (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government what plans they have to ensure that every police force in England has specialist child protection teams.
Answered by Lord Sharpe of Epsom - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Home Office)
The allocation of resources within forces is an operational decision for Chief Constables. To ensure that all forces have adequate children’s safeguarding measures in place, the police are held to account by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS), which scrutinises how well all police forces across England and Wales are responding to and safeguarding vulnerable children through its rolling programme of inspections.
The Government is committed to improving the policing response to child protection, funding national programmes to develop and deliver an effective and victim-focused response safeguarding children. This includes a Vulnerability Knowledge and Practice Programme which identifies and shares best practice across police forces, the Tackling Organised Exploitation Programme which helps police to uncover more offending against children, as well as a range of officer training programmes across all ranks to improve their confidence and capability to investigate and respond to child protection and safeguarding cases.
Asked by: Lord Laming (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to tackle the absence rate of pupils in secondary schools in England of over 15 per cent.
Answered by Baroness Barran
Being in school and ready to learn is crucial to pupils’ attainment, wellbeing, and wider life chances.
The department's focus is on supporting children and young people to recover from the disruption of COVID-19 through a multi-year programme and has made available almost £5 billion for education recovery. This includes nearly £2 billion of direct funding to schools so they can deliver evidence-based interventions based on pupil needs.
We have also published new guidance, ‘Working together to improve school attendance’, which makes clear the importance of addressing the barriers to attendance through strong multi-agency working at school, multi-academy trust and local authority level.
The department consulted on making this guidance statutory and received broad support. We intend to make this guidance statutory when parliamentary time allows.
The department has brought together an Action Alliance of lead professionals from key frontline services that support families. Members from education, health, justice, the third sector and parent organisations have collectively committed to use their roles and organisations to undertake activities to improve attendance.
Asked by: Lord Laming (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they intend to take in response to reports that some providers of residential care services are not following government guidelines, and continue to deny residents visits by family and friends even when the home is free from all infections.
Answered by Lord Markham
The Government's guidance is clear that every resident should be able to receive at least one visitor in all circumstances. Where visiting is not being supported in line with guidance, we work with the UK Health Security Agency’s health protection teams to resolve any local issues. The Care Quality Commission can also investigate complaints and has regulatory powers to act where providers do not appropriately support people to have access to visits. We recognise that there are instances where residents are unable to receive visitors and we are therefore reviewing further options to avoid restrictions on visiting.
Asked by: Lord Laming (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the report by His Majesty's Inspectorate of Probation Annual Report 2022: Serious Further Offences, published on 29 September, what steps they will take to prevent people under probation supervision from committing serious sexual or violent offences.
Answered by Lord Bellamy
Serious further offences are rare. Fewer than 0.5% of offenders under statutory supervision are charged with a serious further offence, but we know that each offence will have a devastating impact on the victims and their families. We carry out a thorough review into each one to identify whether our practice needs to change for the better management of future cases.
Risk cannot be eliminated entirely. However, all offenders managed in the community on licence are subject to strict conditions, to enable the Probation Service to manage their risk effectively. Offenders who breach their licence conditions so as to exhibit increased risk are liable to be recalled to custody. Known sexual and violent offenders are managed under the Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA). MAPPA are a statutory framework, in which the Police, Prison and Probation Services are required to work together to assess and manage offenders’ risks.
Efficient sharing of information between Police and Probation is key to keeping people safe. We have assigned £1.5 million per year to fund staff directly to access police domestic abuse information and a further £4 million to work with Children’s Services to access safeguarding information. In the 2021 Spending Review, we made permanent the additional £155 million per year for the new unified Probation Service that has been invested since 2020/21. This has helped us recruit a record-breaking 1007 trainee probation officers in 2020/21 and 1518 in 2021/22, with a further 1500 planned for 2022/23.
Asked by: Lord Laming (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to reduce the number of children in the care of English local authorities being placed in Scotland.
Answered by Baroness Barran
In England, the responsibility for ensuring a looked-after child or young person is in the appropriate placement rests with local authorities as they are best placed to understand the specific needs of individual children in their care. Local authorities have a duty to ensure sufficient appropriate provision for all of the children they look after.
The department recognises, however, that some local authorities sometimes find it difficult accessing the most appropriate accommodation, particularly for children with the most complex needs, and that children are sometimes placed in locations away from home, when they may be better served by a placement in their local area, were one available.
The lack of available and suitable placements for the most vulnerable children is something this government takes seriously. With that in mind, the government is taking significant steps to support local authorities to fulfil their statutory duties. Between now and 2025, £259 million will be made available to develop and expand the provision of both secure and open homes, to reduce out of area placements, to provide for children with complex needs, and to promote innovative practice to maintain placement stability or prevent children from entering the care system.
Recognising the urgency of action in placement sufficiency, and following the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, the department will also work with local authorities on recruiting more foster carers.
Asked by: Lord Laming (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the report by the Prison Reform Trust Prison: the facts, published on 15 July; and what steps they will take in response.
Answered by Lord Bellamy
The Prison Reform Trust’s report raises a number of issues on which encouraging progress is being made, including work on the Prisons White Paper commitments.
This includes addressing retention of prison officers, and from October 2016 to March 2022, the number of band 3-5 prison officers increased by over 4,000. The most recent pay award provides at least a 4% base pay increase for all prison staff between Operational Support Grade and Governors (Bands 2-11).
We are creating a more resilient estate by both building additional prison places and undertaking refurbishments. This means investing £3.8 billion to deliver 20,000 additional, modern prison places including 2,000 temporary prison places across England and Wales. We are also investing £37 million to deliver improvements to prison safety, as well as investing a further £120 million in tackling substance misuse over the next three years to get more offenders engaged in treatment.
In March, we completed our £100 million Security Investment Programme which will enable us to tackle efforts to undermine prison stability.
There is also a range of projects addressing the diversity of needs among the prison population. This includes developing further support for neurodivergent prisoners by introducing additional staff roles or screening tools as well as developing a strategy supporting older prisoners.
We are continuing to work with Governors across the estate to ensure we are restoring services effectively whilst addressing any backlogs created during the pandemic.
Asked by: Lord Laming (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask Her Majesty's Government how many posts in the Department of Health and Social Care are filled by qualified (1) doctors, and (2) social workers.
Answered by Lord Kamall
There are 49 qualified doctors in Departmental posts. While there is no centralised record of the number of social workers in the Department, there are three qualified social workers in the Chief Social Worker’s office.
Asked by: Lord Laming (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what is the most senior post in the Department of Health and Social Care that is occupied by a qualified social worker with experience of working in local government.
Answered by Lord Kamall
The Chief Social Worker for Adults, Lyn Romeo, is a qualified and registered social worker.