Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department will take to measure the effectiveness of its voluntary code of practice on out-of-school settings.

The voluntary code of practice, which was published in October 2020, is intended to be a supportive resource for out of school setting providers that sets out good safeguarding practice and outlines which areas should be considered when operating out of school settings for children and young people, including health and safety, fire safety, and developing child protection policies and procedures: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/keeping-children-safe-in-out-of-school-settings-code-of-practice.

To help raise awareness and encourage take-up of the code of practice after publication, we provided £60,000 of funding to be shared across 6 local authorities to test targeted communications approaches with out of school settings providers.

The code is also part of a larger package of work the department is undertaking to improve the safeguarding of children in out of school settings. This includes over £3 million of targeted funding for selected areas to demonstrate how safeguarding in out of school settings can be enhanced through multi-agency working and engaging providers with supportive resources such as the code of practice.

The targeted communications and multi-agency working pilots concluded in December 2021. We are currently evaluating these, and the insights gained will be used to inform next steps, such as how best to measure effectiveness of the code of practice.