Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will make an assessment of the implications for her policies of the findings in the report by Action for Children in their report entitled Above and beyond, published on 25 April 2024, on the number of children that experience barriers to their education due to issues outside school.

This government recognises the importance of providing early and timely help for children to support them to achieve their full potential at school so that they can thrive in adulthood.

At the last spending review, the department announced over £1 billion toward programmes to improve early help services from birth to adulthood, including delivering on Family Hubs and helping families facing multiple disadvantage through the Supporting Families and Holiday Activities and Food programmes.

The department’s statutory guidance, titled ‘Working together to safeguard children’, which was updated in 2023, confirms the expectation that local areas should have a range of evidence-based services available to provide early support for children and families who need it.

In ‘Stable Homes, Built on Love’, the department announced plans to build on the strengths of early help services through the implementation of Family Help. In the Families First for Children Pathfinder, the department is investigating how multi-disciplinary family help teams can provide targeted support to help children and families overcome challenges at the earliest opportunity.

The department is spending more on children’s mental health services than ever before and working across government to ensure partnerships working across different sectors are delivering for children who need support.

The department is also continuing to roll out Mental Health Support Teams in education settings and supporting schools and colleges to train senior mental health leads, ensuring that as many young people as possible have access to the support they need.

Up to an additional £2.3 billion of additional funding a year since 2018/19 has been allocated to expand and transform mental health services. This is with the aim that 345,000 more children and young people will have been able to access NHS-funded mental health support by March 2024.

The department is making the ‘Working together to improve school attendance’ guidance statutory from September 2024. This sets out how schools, local authorities and other services need to work together to support pupils at risk of poor attendance and how support provided to these families is consistent across the country.

The department’s package of wide-ranging reforms designed to support schools to improve attendance means there were 440,000 fewer children persistently absent or not attending in 2022/23 compared to 2021/22.