Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment she has made of the potential implications for her policies of the report by the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, published on 26 November 2024; and what steps she is taking to include the (a) prevention and (b) tackling of child sexual abuse in her Department's plans for introducing Multi-Agency Child Protection Units.

This government is committed to keeping children safe and to breaking the link between young people’s backgrounds and their success. Reforming children’s social care is critical to giving hundreds of thousands of children and young people the start in life they deserve.

The department is very grateful for the work of the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, including their report published last week on child sexual abuse in the family environment. Any instance of child abuse is abhorrent, and this report importantly highlights the weaknesses in the system that have shielded abusers and left children at risk of harm. There is a renewed government focus in which we will be driving a holistic and ambitious response to tackling all forms of abuse, including child sexual abuse. Multi-agency child protection teams are based on a recommendation from a previous Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel report, Child Protection in England. They are part of the Families First for Children (FFC) pathfinders that draw on evidence from the ‘Supporting Families’ and ‘Strengthening families, protecting children’ programmes, which deliver multi-agency and multi-disciplinary whole-family support for children and young people. Evaluation of the ‘Supporting Families’ programme showed a 32% reduction in children going into care from families within two years of being on the programme. The ‘Family Safeguarding’ programme evaluation also found significant reductions in the numbers of new looked after children aged under 12, which reduced by 26%, average number of children on Child Protection Plans aged under 12, which reduced by 43%, and police call outs, the monthly average of which reduced by 64%.

In the ten FFC pathfinder areas, multi-agency child protection practitioners from the local authority, police, health and other relevant agencies are working together in a much more integrated way with overall responsibility for protecting children from harm, alongside social workers with the highest levels of knowledge and skills in child protection work. We know that by working together, agencies are better able to accurately and quickly identify when children are likely to experience, or are experiencing, significant harm and take decisive and skilled action to address this.

In addition to the £45 million already invested in the FFC pathfinder programme, last week the government announced two grants for Children’s Services in 2025/26 which should be used together, alongside the £680 million increase in the Social Care Grant:

• A Children’s Social Care Prevention Grant worth £250 million of new funding to enable direct investment in additional prevention activity through transition to Family Help.
• A Children and Families Grant worth £415 million, including £253.5 million of what was ‘Supporting Families’ funding in 2024/25.