Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he is taking to ensure that information gathered during independent return home interviews is shared with (a) local authority children’s services, (b) police and (c) voluntary services, to allow those parties to prepare adequate action plans.

The department’s statutory guidance on children who run away or go missing from home or from care is clear that information-sharing between professionals and local agencies is essential in identifying patterns of behaviour for individual children, and for wider groups of children, at risk of harm. This guidance is available here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/children-who-run-away-or-go-missing-from-home-or-care.

The collaboration between professionals and local agencies includes effective scrutiny and sharing of information from return interviews between local authorities, police forces, the voluntary sector and health and education settings. This ensures that the welfare concerns of individual children and wider ‘hotspots’ of risks, such as sexual and criminal exploitation, are identified, tackled and disrupted effectively.

The statutory guidance also makes clear that these local safeguarding partners should ensure that a local Runaway and Missing From Home and Care protocol is completed and reviewed regularly. A crucial part of this partnership join-up is the analysis of information and intelligence captured during return interviews.

As part of Ofsted’s inspections of children’s services, they consider how well children and young people are helped and protected and will challenge poor practice.