Crimes of Violence: Children and Young People
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to keep children and young people safe from violence (a) on the streets and (b) in schools.
Answered by Catherine McKinnell
Children’s wellbeing and safety is a priority for this government. In the community, there are a range of interventions from across government aimed at keeping children safe. In addition to existing community-based interventions, Young Futures Hubs will bring together services to improve access to opportunities and support for young people at community level, promoting positive outcomes and enabling young people to thrive.
Education can be a significant protective factor. Statutory guidance including ‘Working together to safeguard children’ and ‘Keeping children safe in education’ sets out the safeguarding duties and responsibilities of education settings. This spans action taken within schools, such as through effective whole-school behaviour policies and pastoral support provision, through to the role of schools within multi-agency safeguarding arrangements and action taken by schools to escalate concerns about children to local authority services. Furthermore, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill will put in place a package of support to enhance multi-agency working to keep children safe and ensure they can thrive. This includes placing a duty on safeguarding partners to automatically include education and childcare settings in their multi-agency safeguarding arrangements.
Through existing statutory relationships, sex and health education, pupils are taught how to build respectful and empathetic relationships and appropriate ways of resolving conflict, including a clear message that resorting to violence is never acceptable.
We currently support those pupils most at risk through two place-based programmes that provide specialist support in serious violence hotspots in England. Support, attend, fulfil, exceed (SAFE) taskforces are school-led partnerships that develop a targeted, local response to serious violence in 10 areas. Interventions delivered include mentoring, social skills training and cognitive behavioural approaches. In alternative provision (AP) settings, Alternative Provision Specialist Taskforces (APSTs) are joined up, multi-disciplinary teams (including youth workers, family workers and careers workers) embedded within the largest AP schools in 22 areas.
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