Children and Families: Cross-Government Strategy

Opened the debate

I am concerned about the inconsistencies in supporting children across various aspects of life including health, education, child poverty, enrichment activities, financial education, and preparation for work. The key challenge lies in coordinating efforts between different government departments to ensure that every child receives consistent support. For example, there is a need to address issues such as school surpluses exceeding £1.4 billion and market failures affecting refugee children placements.

Government Response

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds) for securing this important debate about how we work across Government to improve outcomes for children and their families. Over the past decade, we have worked consistently to improve outcomes for every child, such as narrowing the attainment gap through the Department for Education's efforts alongside schools. However, the pandemic has thrown up additional challenges and families rely on policies and programmes owned across Government. Departments must keep families front and centre of all they do, and I am proud of the progress the Government have made in joining up services for children and families. Ministers and officials have never worked more closely together than over this pandemic period. We continue to partner with other departments to deliver the cross-Government vulnerable children and young people's programme, providing additional funding such as £4.6 billion of un-ringfenced funding to councils for both children and adult social care in 2020-21 and another £1.5 billion-plus this year. We also provided £450 million for the national voucher scheme to support pupils eligible for free school meals when they stayed at home, expanded our holiday activities and food programme with up to £220 million available to local authorities across the country, and the Department for Work and Pensions has provided more than £400 million in local authority welfare schemes. We must continue to work in those strong partnerships to improve outcomes for our children and families, especially the most vulnerable. The public commitments set out in the joint Green Paper are only one part of the story; we are improving children and young people's mental health support with significant reforms and investment, championing the family hub model providing more than £14 million of investment, and working to support young people through transitions from primary to secondary school and into higher education. We have published revised statutory guidance on keeping children safe in education and continue to work with local authority safeguarding partners and the sector on tightening the statutory guidance.