Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to monitor the development of young people who have left care.

The department does not record data on the reason for deaths of care leavers.

We are committed to ensuring that care leavers are able to access the mental health support that they need to maintain positive emotional health and well-being. A joint Department of Health and Department for Education Expert Working Group has recently published its proposals for improving the mental health of looked after children and care leavers. A copy of their report is available at: https://www.scie.org.uk/children/care/mental-health/report.

Work to address the Expert Group’s findings is already underway. We are putting a record £1.4 billion into children and young people’s mental health and a further £3 million has been committed to support the recently published Children and Young People’s Mental Health Green Paper. We will now consider the Expert Working Group’s report in the context of the green paper with a view to taking further action.

More broadly, the government published its third progress report on preventing suicide in England in 2016, including the measures it is taking to prevent suicides among children and young people. A copy of the report is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/582117/Suicide_report_2016_A.pdf.

We published our new cross-government strategy, Keep on Caring, in July 2016 which set out the measures we will take to improve the overall outcomes for care leavers. A copy is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/535899/Care-Leaver-Strategy.pdf.

The department publishes data annually on care leavers aged 17 to 21, which includes information on their main activity and whether or not they are in suitable accommodation. The latest data is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/children-looked-after-in-england-including-adoption-2016-to-2017.