Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment has she made of the adequacy of support for young people in kinship care to pursue work based training and apprenticeships.

The government is determined to give every child and young person the opportunities they deserve, and kinship carers play a crucial role in delivering this. Young people who receive care from relatives and friends need extra support, including in further education (FE), and the department is working to ensure their needs are met.

The department recently announced a £40 million package to trial a new Kinship Financial Allowance in up to ten local authorities, to test whether paying an allowance to cover the additional costs of supporting the child can help increase the number of children taken in by family members and friends.

This is the single biggest investment made by government in kinship care to date. This investment could transform the lives of vulnerable children who can no longer live at home, by allowing children to grow up within their families and communities, reducing disruption to their early years and allowing them to focus on schooling, building friendships and later employment and training.

We are developing a comprehensive strategy for post‐16 education and skills, to break down barriers to opportunity, support the development of a skilled workforce, and drive economic growth.

The department has committed to improve careers advice and guarantee two weeks’ worth of work experience for every young person, including those in kinship care. This will underpin our Opportunity Mission, ensuring that every young person has multiple opportunities, tailored to their needs, to learn from different employers about work and the skills that are valued in the workplace.

The department expects schools to develop and improve their careers provision to be inclusive for all young people, in line with the world-class Gatsby Benchmarks, including benchmark 3, which focuses on addressing the individual needs of each pupil.

The department is bringing together Jobcentre Plus with the National Careers Service to create a new jobs and careers service. This will lead to greater awareness and focus on skills and careers, as well as better join-up between employability and careers provision.

The department continues to provide employers and providers with additional funding to support more apprenticeship opportunities for young people, including those who have been in kinship care. We provide £1,000 to both employers and training providers when they take on apprentices aged 16 to 18-years-old, and up to age 24 for apprentices with an education, health and care (EHC) plan or who have been in local authority care. These payments can be used to support costs such as work equipment, uniforms or travel.

The department funds students aged 16 to 19-years-old or up to the age of 25 when they have an EHC plan. This funding enables students to take part in study programmes which include qualifications with other activities including tutorials or work experience, or to take part in T Levels which includes a technical qualification, other activities such as employment, and an industrial placement.

Both are designed to enable students to progress to employment, an apprenticeship, or further study including higher education.

Every local authority in England must appoint a virtual school head, who has a statutory duty to promote the educational achievement of all children in their care, wherever they live or are educated, up to age 18. All looked after children must have a personal education plan, which should set out the support needed to help realise their short and long term academic outcomes. This should include careers advice and guidance and financial information about further and higher education, training and employment.

The department is providing £24 million of pupil premium plus funding to virtual school heads between the 2023/24 and 2024/25 financial years, to enable them to provide extra support to children in care and care leavers in post-16 education, with £10 million allocated to local authorities in 2023/24 and a further £14 million in 2024/25.

16-19 bursaries are available to help young people who would not otherwise be able to afford to participate in FE and training, such as Study Programmes or T Levels, to help them pay for essential costs like books, food, travel, equipment or other education-related costs. These awards are made by institutions to individual students. It is up to institutions to decide which students will receive a discretionary bursary and how much they will receive. They are targeted at those students who need most financial help to overcome barriers to participation. Most institutions include information about the Bursary Fund on their websites and young people can also contact their school’s, or college’s, student support services for more information on how to apply.