Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to her Department's statutory guidance entitled Working Together to Safeguard Children, updated 8 May 2025, whether she has made an assessment of the potential merits of including adoptive parents.

The ‘Working together to safeguard children’ statutory guidance is multi-agency guidance that sets out the help, support and protection available to all children and their families. Where the guidance refers to parents, this includes adoptive parents. The guidance was updated in 2023 with a focus on strengthening multi-agency working across the whole system of help, support and protection, maintaining a child focus within a whole family approach to help and support and embedding strong, effective multi-agency child protection practice.

The department is committed to reviewing the ‘Working together to safeguard children’ guidance every year. On 8 May 2025, we published an illustrated version of the guidance for children, young people and their families which can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/working-together-to-safeguard-children--2.