Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment his Department made prior to the closure of schools in March 2020 of the impact of closures on safeguarding vulnerable children.

The government recognises that attending school is a vital protective factor when it comes to safeguarding and supporting vulnerable children.

That is why we kept schools, colleges and nurseries open throughout the COVID-19 outbreak and prioritised the attendance of vulnerable children.

Additionally, we took steps to ensure that vulnerable children had access to wider support by ensuring that children's social care services and early help services continued to operate. We worked with local authorities, the police and charities to tackle hidden harms, and we established a Vulnerable Children and Young People survey of local authorities, to make sure that we had an accurate picture of contact between these pupils and social workers.

The Public Accounts Committee report into the Department for Education’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak can be found here: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5802/cmselect/cmpubacc/240/24006.htm#_idTextAnchor006.