Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what guidance her Department provides to councils on encouraging the use of kinship care arrangements.

The department’s statutory guidance on the purpose, principles for practice and expected outcomes of children’s social care that should be achieved so children and young people can grow up to achieve and thrive is in the Children’s Social Care National Framework.

The second outcome of the national framework sets out the expectation that children’s social care “needs to consider how to unlock family networks and identify kinship carers to be a source of support, whenever children and young people need help, protection, or care”.

The support available to help embed the national framework in practice is available in the accompanying advice. Further, the kinship care statutory guidance for local authorities sets out a framework for the provision of support to kinship families, and how family networks can be engaged to support the needs of children throughout the children’s social care system, including those unable to live with their parents.