Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking with Cabinet colleagues to develop a cross-Government strategy for reducing the numbers of missing children.

This government champions the need for an effective multi-agency response that reduces the number of children going missing, whether this is from a family home or from the care of the local authority.

The department’s long-standing statutory guidance on safeguarding children at risk of going missing is already clear on the expectation that local authorities and safeguarding partners need to work together to reduce missing episodes, and to respond effectively when children do go missing.

In addition, the government’s statutory guidance ‘Working together to safeguard children’ promotes robust information-sharing across safeguarding partners, which we know is essential for identifying local contexts and disrupting local patterns of behaviours that can raise the risk of children in and outside the care system going missing, including being missing from education.

Children in care can be especially vulnerable to going missing. That is why the department, working with the Home Office, has supported the National Police Chiefs' Council to develop a ‘Missing Children from Care' framework. This good practice framework can be adopted by local areas when designing their multi-agency protocols for strategic and operational responses to missing episodes, ensuring that the appropriate safeguarding partner responds in the best interest of the missing person.

Since April, the government is providing £500 million to local authorities nationally, to roll out family help and multi-agency child protection support. We have set up the Families First Partnership programme to support the delivery of these reforms, with local areas beginning transformation from April 2025.