Pregnancy: Vulnerable Adults

(asked on 11th January 2022) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the potential effect of the pause programme on preventing successive pregnancies in vulnerable women.


Answered by
Will Quince Portrait
Will Quince
This question was answered on 18th January 2022

The November 2020 independent evaluation of the Department for Education funded Pause programme, reported a statistically significant reduction in rates of infants (under 12 months) entering care in local authorities with a Pause practice, compared to an increase in comparator sites over the same period. There were an estimated 215, or 30%, fewer children over 3 years and 5 sites compared to the comparator local authorities.

The estimated benefit to cost ratios associated with these effects are £4.50 per £1 spent on Pause over 4 years and £7.61 per £1 spent over 18 years. Wider observed impacts for female participants include:

  • improved emotional wellbeing and reductions in psychological distress;
  • housing and financial security, with significant reductions in rent arrears, and the number of women who were homeless or in unstable accommodation almost halved;
  • increased engagement in education, employment, and specialist services, including a 60% increase in the proportion of women in paid employment;
  • improvements in key relationships in women’s lives, including relationships with existing children and their carers, with a 25% increase in the proportion of women reporting face-to-face contact with children.

There are currently 17 local authorities delivering Pause projects with £3.6 million of funding from the department’s innovation fund. In 2021, we provided additional funding for 3 regions to scale and spread Pause projects under strand 3 of the Recovery and Build Back Better Fund.

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