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 number of care leavers who have access to university education.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Shadow Minister (Education)
This government is committed to ensuring that all care leavers are supported to succeed in education and achieve positive outcomes. The ‘Stable Homes, Built on Love’ strategy sets out the department’s plans to reform the children’s social care system, including improving the education, employment and training outcomes of children in care and care leavers. This includes, from 2027, a year-on-year narrowing of the gap in care leaver higher education participation rates compared to the general population.
We will introduce a gold standard accreditation scheme for further and higher education institutions supporting care leavers, working with an expert advisory group to develop the accreditation in partnership with the sector, and will consult on plans to expand the Virtual School Head role to include children in care and care leavers up to age 25. Local authorities must also provide a £2,000 bursary for care leavers who go to university.
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 ensure that the 130,000 children of homeless families are receiving an education in school.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Shadow Minister (Education)
All children of compulsory school age, regardless of their circumstances, are entitled to a full-time education which is suitable to their age, ability, aptitude and any special educational needs that they may have. The department consulted and implemented changes to the statutory School Admissions Code in 2021 to improve the in-year school admissions process and fair access protocols. Fair access protocols are the safety net to secure school places in-year for vulnerable and unplaced children, where the in-year admissions process fails. In those changes, the department identified a list of categories of children who are eligible for placement in fair access, which included children who are homeless. The school admissions code can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-admissions-code--2.
The ‘Working together to improve school attendance’ guidance expects schools, local authorities and partners to work with pupils and parents to remove any barriers to school attendance by building strong and trusting relationships, and working together to put the right support in place. This guidance can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/working-together-to-improve-school-attendance. In all cases, schools should be sensitive and should avoid stigmatising pupils and parents. They should talk to pupils and parents to understand what they think would help improve their attendance. This allows individual approaches that meet an individual pupil’s specific needs.
All schools should be calm, orderly, safe, and supportive environments where pupils can thrive and reach their potential in safety and dignity. Teachers know their pupils best and are in the best position to identify their needs and to plan which approaches will meet them most effectively.
Asked by: Lord Laming (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government what discussions they have had with (1) the Chief Pharmaceutical Officer, (2) the Care Quality Commission, (3) the General Pharmaceutical Council, and (4) the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, relating to the performance of homecare medicines services.
Answered by Lord Markham - Shadow Minister (Science, Innovation and Technology)
The Department has not made an assessment of the performance of the National Homecare Medicines Committee (NHMC). Providers of Homecare Medicine services to National Health Service patients do so under framework agreements and contracts which may be held at national level through NHS England, regional level through NHS procurement hubs, or local level through hospital trusts. This therefore requires a high degree of centralised co-ordination for which the NHMC liaises with homecare providers through their trade association the National Clinical Homecare Association (NCHA) to support and co-ordinate development of the homecare market and discuss any system wide issues. The NHMC includes representatives from the NHS, including NHS England and Pharmaceutical officers, homecare providers, pharmaceutical manufacturer associations and the Care Quality Commission.
NHS England, the NHMC and the NCHA have discussed concerns about the performance of homecare medicines services with officials from the Department.
Asked by: Lord Laming (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the performance of the National Homecare Medicines Committee.
Answered by Lord Markham - Shadow Minister (Science, Innovation and Technology)
The Department has not made an assessment of the performance of the National Homecare Medicines Committee (NHMC). Providers of Homecare Medicine services to National Health Service patients do so under framework agreements and contracts which may be held at national level through NHS England, regional level through NHS procurement hubs, or local level through hospital trusts. This therefore requires a high degree of centralised co-ordination for which the NHMC liaises with homecare providers through their trade association the National Clinical Homecare Association (NCHA) to support and co-ordinate development of the homecare market and discuss any system wide issues. The NHMC includes representatives from the NHS, including NHS England and Pharmaceutical officers, homecare providers, pharmaceutical manufacturer associations and the Care Quality Commission.
NHS England, the NHMC and the NCHA have discussed concerns about the performance of homecare medicines services with officials from the Department.
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 the number of children placed in local authority care.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Shadow Minister (Education)
The department published its plans to reform children’s social care on 2 February 2023 in ‘Stable Homes, Built on Love’, which can be found here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1147317/Children_s_social_care_stable_homes_consultation_February_2023.pdf.
‘Stable Homes, Built on Love’ sets out how the department will help families to overcome challenges at an early stage, keep children safe and make sure those in care have stability, long-term loving relationships and opportunities for a good life. Over the next two years, the department will address urgent issues facing children and families now and lay the foundations for a whole system reform.
A central aim of the reform programme is to keep more children safely with their families, where this is possible. The department will invest more than £45 million over the next two years through its ‘Families First for Children Pathfinder’, which will test the implementation of reforms across Family Help, Child Protection, and Family Network Support Packages. This will inform wider roll out.
Whilst the government recognises the importance of reducing the number of placements for children in the care system, placements can be the right option for some children. The strategy also sets out how the department is prioritising work with local authorities to ensure children have access to the right placements at the right time.
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 - Shadow Minister (Education)
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 - Shadow Minister (Education)
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 - Shadow Minister (Business and Trade)
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 - Shadow Minister (Education)
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 - Shadow Minister (Science, Innovation and Technology)
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.