17 Jul, 2025
“Children in care have experienced trauma, abuse and neglect, and they are over four times more likely to suffer from emotional or mental health problems than their peers. It is therefore essential that there is a strong system in place to support them. Currently, the support available is falling far short of what is needed.”
The Education Committee’s new report on children’s social care illustrates the urgent need for investment in preventative safeguarding programmes for babies, children, and families.
The Committee highlights a steep rise in the number of children needing support from the social care system; an increase driven largely by reduced early intervention measures and compounded by rising poverty, neglect, and emotional abuse.
The report is clear: without decisive investment in early help, the current system will remain reactive, costly, and harmful to children’s outcomes. The Committee notes that government spending on preventative services has fallen over the past decade, and it strongly recommends reversing this trend by scaling up early intervention programmes.
While the report doesn’t explicitly outline the needs of babies, we believe its call for greater early intervention and family-focused care should extend to the earliest stages of life, including pregnancy and infancy. Infants aged one and under make up a quarter of all children in care proceedings, with newborn babies making up an increasing proportion of infant cases; 50% in England and Wales in 2023 (Source: Centre for Child and Family Justice Research, Lancaster University). At The For Baby’s Sake Trust, we know that these earliest years, and earliest relationships, shape lifelong outcomes.
We welcome the report’s acknowledgement that family reunification, when done “carefully and effectively,” can be a positive path for children leaving care. But as the Committee rightly warns, there is currently “not enough of a focus on reunification within Government or local authorities.”
We also strongly support the Committee’s call for the Department for Education to fund a national survey on the prevalence of abuse and neglect, to better inform future safeguarding policy. However, not enough weight is given in the report to the impacts of domestic abuse as a specific category.
We urge the Government to introduce domestic abuse as a distinct abuse category within Child Protection plans. Current categories fail to capture the prevalence and complexity of domestic abuse, including coercive control, economic abuse, and harm caused through parental conflict, and do not reflect whether abuse is occurring within a personal connection as defined in domestic abuse legislation.
Clear delineation of domestic abuse as a category is essential to improve data, understanding, and responses that centre the safety and well-being of both children and parents, as we first called for upon the publication of our report into infant referrals to children’s social care. The pressing need for this categorisation is evidence by the lived experience of a mother who shared on the Pause podcast with our CEO, Lauren Seager-Smith, that:
“Even though we try our best, we still get branded as a failure [...] what makes it worse, is that when you’re going through Child Protection, there’s nothing where you can put it down as domestic abuse, and that was the worst thing for me. I kicked off as they put it down to neglect [...] I never neglected my kid [...] and that makes it worse because when your children are old enough and they’re reading their things, and it comes up like ‘well you neglected me’ [...] but how can you explain that to a child? They weren’t removed for that – neglect. They were removed because of something that was out of my control”.
At The For Baby’s Sake Trust, we are committed to breaking cycles of domestic abuse and trauma through whole-family, trauma-informed early intervention. Our For Baby’s Sake programme begins during pregnancy and supports both parents in creating safe, nurturing relationships and co-parenting practices.
We also recognise the long-term impact of early trauma on care-experienced young people. That’s why we launched My Future Me, a pilot programme co-produced with care-experienced young people to support emotional safety, healing, and future planning.
The Education Committee’s report is a welcome call to action. We urge the Government to respond with urgency, courage, and commitment, prioritising babies, children, and families at every stage of their lives.
