Asked by: Jess Asato (Labour - Lowestoft)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment her Department has made of the potential merits of introducing school-based whole family support practitioners to support the SEND system.
Answered by Catherine McKinnell - Minister of State (Education)
This government wants to create a high-quality system that places children and families at the centre of its design, providing meaningful and consistent support for families as their needs change over time.
Schools, colleges, early years and childcare settings, and other educational providers, including alternative provision, all have a pivotal role to play in safeguarding children and promoting their welfare. Their insight and co-operation are vital to the successful delivery of multi-agency safeguarding arrangements. People working in education settings play an important role in building relationships, identifying concerns and providing direct support to children.
The Children’s Social Care National Framework sets out the purpose, principles and enablers of good practice and the outcomes that should be achieved. The guidance describes what everyone working with families should do and helps everyone come together with a clear vision for how to transform the support that families receive.
Services should prioritise supporting the whole family, recognising that problems do not exist in silos and are often interconnected and intergenerational. Intervening to provide support at the earliest opportunity can help prevent challenges from escalating and improve outcomes.
Family hubs play an important role helping families access vital services to improve the health, education and wellbeing of children, young people and their families. As part of the family hubs’ ‘Start for Life’ programme, there are now over 400 family hubs open across 88 local authorities, creating a welcoming place where families with children aged 0 to 19, or up to 25 with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), can be connected to a wide range of services.
Programme guidance outlines the minimum expectation that local authorities should be delivering in their family hubs for SEND support Family Hub Service Expectations.
This support includes the staff in the family hub being knowledgeable about the SEND services available and being able to connect families to SEND services within the family hub network.
Over the last three years, many of the local authorities on the programme have chosen to focus on improving SEND services, bringing local offers together in one place and funding early identification/intervention on speech, language and communication needs.
Asked by: Jess Asato (Labour - Lowestoft)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department plans to take to help students studying classroom-based electrical technical diplomas transition into the electrical workforce.
Answered by Janet Daby - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The department is looking at ways of improving the transition rate from further education (FE) courses into construction sector jobs. This includes through the defunding of low-quality courses through the qualifications review.
The department is also working to find ways to narrow the practical experience gap that the industry reports is preventing them from employing people directly after achieving an FE qualification. We will likely need alternative bridging provision for some occupations for those completing FE courses. We are working with the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) and competency bodies to improve the learner journey and bridge the gap between achieving qualifications and being competent to begin work.
Asked by: Jess Asato (Labour - Lowestoft)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment her Department has made of the potential impact of work by third-sector organisations to (a) support families of children struggling with school attendance and (b) tackle the root causes of low school attendance.
Answered by Stephen Morgan - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
This government is committed to tackling school absence, including through our attendance guidance, our national enforcement framework and engagement with schools, local authorities and the third sector.
The ‘Working together to improve school attendance’ guidance was developed following government consultation and using effective practice from within the sector. It built on what schools, trusts and local authorities were already successfully doing to improve attendance, particularly in above-average areas of deprivation.
The guidance was first published in 2022 in non-statutory form to give schools and local authorities time to embed the expectations. Since the guidance was published, attendance hubs have offered support to around 2,000 schools to improve their attendance practice, and every local authority in the country has been offered attendance adviser support to help them implement the expectations. Prior to the guidance becoming statutory, a large majority of leaders reported that they either knew a bit about the guidance or were familiar with the details, and almost all of them reported that their school monitors pupil attendance data. A majority of leaders said that their school has a single point of contact at the local authority, and at least half said they hold targeting support meetings with them.
An updated statutory version of the guidance was published in August 2024, and the department will keep its effectiveness under review. Since August 2024, every state-funded school is required to share its attendance data, which is published every fortnight. Thanks to the hard work of the sector, we have seen positive initial progress in attendance rates, although there is further to go. The latest published statistics show that the rate of persistent absence (pupils who miss 10% or more of their possible sessions) was 18.6% over the current academic year, which is a 2.0 percentage point improvement compared to the equivalent point last academic year.
We recognise the valuable role that third-sector organisations can play in supporting families of pupils with barriers to attendance and in tackling the root causes of low attendance. Our ‘Working together to improve school attendance’ guidance is clear that both schools and local authorities should work with the voluntary and community sector, amongst other partners, in removing the barriers to attendance that families experience and in facilitating multi-disciplinary support.
The guidance promotes a support-first model and is clear that all partners should always work together to understand the barriers to attendance. However, where that support is not successful, not appropriate (for example, term-time holidays), or not engaged with, the law protects pupils’ right to an education. The guidance outlines a role for legal intervention based on effective practice within the sector. In a public consultation in 2022, 71% of local authority employees and 59% of school and academy trust employees and governors or trustees strongly or somewhat agreed with the proposed national thresholds for the circumstances in which a penalty notice must be considered, which were subsequently adopted last August.
Asked by: Jess Asato (Labour - Lowestoft)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment she has made of the effectiveness of the implementation across (a) schools and (b) local authorities of its working together to improve school attendance guidance; and whether she has plans to review the guidance.
Answered by Stephen Morgan - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
This government is committed to tackling school absence, including through our attendance guidance, our national enforcement framework and engagement with schools, local authorities and the third sector.
The ‘Working together to improve school attendance’ guidance was developed following government consultation and using effective practice from within the sector. It built on what schools, trusts and local authorities were already successfully doing to improve attendance, particularly in above-average areas of deprivation.
The guidance was first published in 2022 in non-statutory form to give schools and local authorities time to embed the expectations. Since the guidance was published, attendance hubs have offered support to around 2,000 schools to improve their attendance practice, and every local authority in the country has been offered attendance adviser support to help them implement the expectations. Prior to the guidance becoming statutory, a large majority of leaders reported that they either knew a bit about the guidance or were familiar with the details, and almost all of them reported that their school monitors pupil attendance data. A majority of leaders said that their school has a single point of contact at the local authority, and at least half said they hold targeting support meetings with them.
An updated statutory version of the guidance was published in August 2024, and the department will keep its effectiveness under review. Since August 2024, every state-funded school is required to share its attendance data, which is published every fortnight. Thanks to the hard work of the sector, we have seen positive initial progress in attendance rates, although there is further to go. The latest published statistics show that the rate of persistent absence (pupils who miss 10% or more of their possible sessions) was 18.6% over the current academic year, which is a 2.0 percentage point improvement compared to the equivalent point last academic year.
We recognise the valuable role that third-sector organisations can play in supporting families of pupils with barriers to attendance and in tackling the root causes of low attendance. Our ‘Working together to improve school attendance’ guidance is clear that both schools and local authorities should work with the voluntary and community sector, amongst other partners, in removing the barriers to attendance that families experience and in facilitating multi-disciplinary support.
The guidance promotes a support-first model and is clear that all partners should always work together to understand the barriers to attendance. However, where that support is not successful, not appropriate (for example, term-time holidays), or not engaged with, the law protects pupils’ right to an education. The guidance outlines a role for legal intervention based on effective practice within the sector. In a public consultation in 2022, 71% of local authority employees and 59% of school and academy trust employees and governors or trustees strongly or somewhat agreed with the proposed national thresholds for the circumstances in which a penalty notice must be considered, which were subsequently adopted last August.
Asked by: Jess Asato (Labour - Lowestoft)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment her Department has made of the effectiveness of non-attendance sanctions.
Answered by Stephen Morgan - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
This government is committed to tackling school absence, including through our attendance guidance, our national enforcement framework and engagement with schools, local authorities and the third sector.
The ‘Working together to improve school attendance’ guidance was developed following government consultation and using effective practice from within the sector. It built on what schools, trusts and local authorities were already successfully doing to improve attendance, particularly in above-average areas of deprivation.
The guidance was first published in 2022 in non-statutory form to give schools and local authorities time to embed the expectations. Since the guidance was published, attendance hubs have offered support to around 2,000 schools to improve their attendance practice, and every local authority in the country has been offered attendance adviser support to help them implement the expectations. Prior to the guidance becoming statutory, a large majority of leaders reported that they either knew a bit about the guidance or were familiar with the details, and almost all of them reported that their school monitors pupil attendance data. A majority of leaders said that their school has a single point of contact at the local authority, and at least half said they hold targeting support meetings with them.
An updated statutory version of the guidance was published in August 2024, and the department will keep its effectiveness under review. Since August 2024, every state-funded school is required to share its attendance data, which is published every fortnight. Thanks to the hard work of the sector, we have seen positive initial progress in attendance rates, although there is further to go. The latest published statistics show that the rate of persistent absence (pupils who miss 10% or more of their possible sessions) was 18.6% over the current academic year, which is a 2.0 percentage point improvement compared to the equivalent point last academic year.
We recognise the valuable role that third-sector organisations can play in supporting families of pupils with barriers to attendance and in tackling the root causes of low attendance. Our ‘Working together to improve school attendance’ guidance is clear that both schools and local authorities should work with the voluntary and community sector, amongst other partners, in removing the barriers to attendance that families experience and in facilitating multi-disciplinary support.
The guidance promotes a support-first model and is clear that all partners should always work together to understand the barriers to attendance. However, where that support is not successful, not appropriate (for example, term-time holidays), or not engaged with, the law protects pupils’ right to an education. The guidance outlines a role for legal intervention based on effective practice within the sector. In a public consultation in 2022, 71% of local authority employees and 59% of school and academy trust employees and governors or trustees strongly or somewhat agreed with the proposed national thresholds for the circumstances in which a penalty notice must be considered, which were subsequently adopted last August.
Asked by: Jess Asato (Labour - Lowestoft)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment she has made of the potential implications for her policies of the charity School-Home Support report entitled Strengthening the bridge between home and school, published on 26 November 2024; and whether she intends to investigate the issues raised in the report.
Answered by Stephen Morgan - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
This government is determined to tackle the generational challenge of school absence, which is a fundamental barrier to learning and life chances. Missing school regularly is harmful to a child’s attainment, safety and physical and mental health, limiting their opportunities to succeed.
The ‘Strengthening the bridge between home and school’ report, published by School-Home Support in November 2024, gives an overview of some of the complex factors which affect school attendance.
We recognise that the barriers to attending regularly can be wide and complex, both within and beyond the school gates, and are often specific to individual pupils and families. Improving attendance must be everyone’s mission. This is why, in August 2024, the department made its ‘Working together to improve school attendance’ guidance statutory, which promotes a ‘support first’ approach and sets out clear expectations for schools, trusts, and local authorities to work together to tackle absence.
Families of children with attendance issues should receive multi-agency support to help resolve complex out-of-school barriers that might affect their attendance, such as housing, transport or mental ill health. This should be from the team or service best placed to support the family and their needs, which may be the school, a local authority team or service, or another statutory partner, such as a health professional. For example, in the case of a pupil experiencing barriers to attendance because of a housing issue, the lead practitioner may more sensibly be the family’s housing officer.
Schools can also allocate pupil premium funding, which has now increased to over £2.9 billion for the 2024/25 financial year, to support disadvantaged pupils with identified needs to attend school regularly.
The department’s work to support school attendance is also supported by broader investments, including funded breakfast clubs for all primary schools to ensure children start their day ready to learn. We are also working across government on plans to provide access to specialist mental health professionals in every school, new Young Futures Hubs, including access to mental health support workers, and an additional 8,500 new mental health staff to treat children and adults.
In addition to this work, the department is also providing tangible direct support for pupils who struggle with their attendance through our attendance mentor programmes. Over £17 million is being invested across two mentoring projects that will support at least 12,000 pupils in 15 areas. The mentoring pilots are designed to work with pupils to tackle individual causes of persistent absence. These programmes are being rigorously evaluated, and the effective practice that we develop will be shared with schools and local authorities nationally.
Asked by: Jess Asato (Labour - Lowestoft)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to calculate the number of experienced adult learners undertaking electrical training via the (a) experienced worker route and (b) an equivalent national vocational qualification.
Answered by Janet Daby - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
Adult, those aged over 19 years old, government-funded further education and skills learning in England is recorded on the individualised learner record and published in the ‘Further education and skills’ statistics publication.
In the 2023/24 academic year, there were 33 adult education and training learning aim enrolments on the level 3 Electrotechnical Experienced Worker Qualification. There were 3,017 enrolments on other level 3 learning aims that are electrical-related.
It should be noted that:
(1) Aim enrolments are a count of enrolments at aim level. Learners will be counted for each aim they are studying and so can be counted more than once.
(2) Learners that are self-funding will not be included.
(3) Electrical-related learning aims are identified as those with ‘Electric’ or ‘Electro’ in the title. The ‘Electrotechnical Experienced Worker Qualification’ is the aim awarded by City & Guilds. There may be other relevant learning aims that are not readily identifiable as related to the electrical profession that are not included here.
(4) The department does not hold information on how much prior experience of the electrical trade that learners taking these aims have.
Asked by: Jess Asato (Labour - Lowestoft)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment she has made of the potential implications for her policies of the report by the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, published on 26 November 2024; and what steps she is taking to include the (a) prevention and (b) tackling of child sexual abuse in her Department's plans for introducing Multi-Agency Child Protection Units.
Answered by Janet Daby - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
This government is committed to keeping children safe and to breaking the link between young people’s backgrounds and their success. Reforming children’s social care is critical to giving hundreds of thousands of children and young people the start in life they deserve.
The department is very grateful for the work of the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, including their report published last week on child sexual abuse in the family environment. Any instance of child abuse is abhorrent, and this report importantly highlights the weaknesses in the system that have shielded abusers and left children at risk of harm. There is a renewed government focus in which we will be driving a holistic and ambitious response to tackling all forms of abuse, including child sexual abuse. Multi-agency child protection teams are based on a recommendation from a previous Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel report, Child Protection in England. They are part of the Families First for Children (FFC) pathfinders that draw on evidence from the ‘Supporting Families’ and ‘Strengthening families, protecting children’ programmes, which deliver multi-agency and multi-disciplinary whole-family support for children and young people. Evaluation of the ‘Supporting Families’ programme showed a 32% reduction in children going into care from families within two years of being on the programme. The ‘Family Safeguarding’ programme evaluation also found significant reductions in the numbers of new looked after children aged under 12, which reduced by 26%, average number of children on Child Protection Plans aged under 12, which reduced by 43%, and police call outs, the monthly average of which reduced by 64%.
In the ten FFC pathfinder areas, multi-agency child protection practitioners from the local authority, police, health and other relevant agencies are working together in a much more integrated way with overall responsibility for protecting children from harm, alongside social workers with the highest levels of knowledge and skills in child protection work. We know that by working together, agencies are better able to accurately and quickly identify when children are likely to experience, or are experiencing, significant harm and take decisive and skilled action to address this.
In addition to the £45 million already invested in the FFC pathfinder programme, last week the government announced two grants for Children’s Services in 2025/26 which should be used together, alongside the £680 million increase in the Social Care Grant:
Asked by: Jess Asato (Labour - Lowestoft)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will make an assessment of the potential merits of introducing a statutory minimum fee framework for foster carers.
Answered by Janet Daby - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
I pay tribute to the vital efforts of foster carers, who carry out a challenging role that requires skill, dedication and love. Our policy statement, ‘Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive’ sets out our plans to recruit and retain more foster carers and provide access to support for both kinship and foster carers. This statement can be found here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/67375fe5ed0fc07b53499a42/Keeping_Children_Safe__Helping_Families_Thrive_.pdf
This government has also confirmed its commitment to further reforms to children’s social care in the future. As part of these reforms, the department will consider how it can further support foster carers and ensure that more children receive loving care in foster families. However, there are no current plans to introduce a statutory minimum fee framework for foster carers.
Fostering service providers, including local authorities, have the flexibility to pay additional fees. Decisions to pay fees are therefore made independently by the fostering service provider. The department encourages all fostering service providers to regularly review the fees they pay to their foster carers to ensure they remain appropriate.
All foster carers should receive at least the National Minimum Allowance (NMA), to cover the costs of raising an extra child in their home. The NMA has been uplifted by 3.55% for the 2025/26 financial year
If any foster carers receive less than the NMA, they should discuss this with their fostering service and use their complaints procedure if necessary. If the issue is not resolved, it can be escalated to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, who has assured the department that these cases will be considered and dealt with appropriately.
Asked by: Jess Asato (Labour - Lowestoft)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if her Department will make an assessment of the potential merits of recognising (a) non-formal and (b) experiential learning alongside academic achievements in the curriculum review.
Answered by Catherine McKinnell - Minister of State (Education)
The Curriculum and Assessment Review (CAR) is being independently conducted by a group of education leaders (the review group) and chaired by Professor Becky Francis CBE. The Terms of Reference were published in July 2024.
The review has been asked to consider how to remove barriers to learning and remove ceilings to achievement. It will support the innovation and professionalism of teachers, enabling them to adapt how they teach the curriculum to their students’ lives and life experiences.
The review will also look at whether the current assessment system can be improved for both young people and staff. It will seek to deliver an assessment system that captures the strengths of every child and young person and the breadth of curriculum with the right balance of assessment methods whilst maintaining the important role of examinations.
The role of the review group is to consider the evidence, the responses to the call for evidence and widespread engagement with the sector over the coming months, and then make recommendations for the government to consider.
The review group will publish an interim report in the new year setting out their interim findings and confirming the key areas for further work. The final review with recommendations will be published in autumn 2025.
The government will consider changes to the National Curriculum and assessment in light of the recommendations of the review.
A link to access the CAR’s call for evidence can be found below: https://www.gov.uk/government/calls-for-evidence/improving-the-curriculum-and-assessment-system.