Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking with local authorities to help increase the rate of reunification of children in kinship care with their birth families.

The department is committed to ensuring that looked after children are able to achieve permanence. Where a looked after child’s permanence plan is to return to the care of their parents, there should be a robust decision-making process to ensure this decision is safe and sustainable and will safeguard and promote their welfare. Local authorities should set out what support and services will be provided following reunification.

In the 2023 update to the statutory guidance ‘Working together to safeguard children’ the department set out that local authorities may consider whether family group decision-making would support the child’s transition home from care, and the role the family network could play in supporting this.

The £45 million Families First for Children Pathfinder programme will test family network reforms including through increased use of family group decision making. This reform area will empower families by prioritising family-led solutions, engaging wider family networks throughout decisions made about a child which may support reunification, including back to birth parents.

The number and percentage of looked after children returning home to live with parents or other people with parental responsibility is published annually in the department’s children looked after statistical release and can be interrogated at local authority level on GOV.UK. Figures are available for the last five years. The department does not intend to break down the data any further to identify returns to birth parents from kinship care.