Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what plans his Department has made to support local authorities with the number of young people entering the care system.

At Autumn Budget, my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced an extra £410 million to address pressures on social care services, along with £84 million over five years to support up to 20 local authorities to improve their social work practice and decision-making, enabling them to work more effectively with the most vulnerable children and their families.

This builds on the £200 billion government has already made available to councils up to 2020 to provide services in the best interests of local residents, including those for children and young people.

In residential care we are investing part of our £200 million children’s social care innovation programme to three projects to increase councils’ capacity and ensure more young people can be matched to the right care placement. We have also recently provided grant funding to three local authorities to conduct feasibility studies into opening new secure provision to increase available capacity and continue to invest in the secure estate through our £40 million capital programme.

We will shortly be providing seed funding to fostering partnerships to increase sufficiency of foster parents. As part of our digital discovery, we are exploring whether, and how, digital solutions could help give a more accurate picture of fostering capacity both locally and nationally, to drive targeted recruitment and improve streamline vacancy management.

We know that local authorities have experienced an increase in the numbers of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) who have particular care needs. That is why, in the 2017 UASC safeguarding strategy, we committed to providing 1,000 training places for foster carers and support workers who care for UASC. We commissioned the Refugee Council to deliver this training across England and training is now underway across the country.