13 October 2025

(10.30 am)

Lady Hallett: Ms Cayoun.

Ms Cayoun: My Lady, thank you. May I please call Ms Indra Morris.

Ms Indra Morris

MS INDRA MORRIS (affirmed).

Lady Hallett: Thank you for coming to help us.

The Witness: Thank you.

Questions From Counsel to the Inquiry

Ms Cayoun: Thank you, Ms Morris. You have provided a witness statement to the Inquiry, I think you have it in front of you.

Ms Indra Morris: I do.

Counsel Inquiry: And the reference for it is INQ000588009. You signed that statement, I think, on 1 August 2025. Can you please confirm that the contents of that statement are true to the best of your knowledge and belief?

Ms Indra Morris: I can.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. Ms Morris, at the time of the pandemic you were the Director General for Strategy, Disadvantage and Social Mobility at the Department for Education, a post that you had held since 2017, and we understand that your remit in that role included children’s social care, special educational needs and disabilities, behaviour and attendance, and that during the pandemic you came to hold the role of senior responsible officer for the Vulnerable Children’s Unit, a cross-government workstream; is that right?

Ms Indra Morris: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. And Ms Morris, we understand that you left the Civil Service in June 2023 and you’re currently the chair of a social mobility charity; is that right?

Ms Indra Morris: Yes, I’m effectively retired with a couple of roles, non-executive roles.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. Before we begin your evidence I think it would be right to acknowledge that in your statement you express reservations about the use of the term “vulnerable”, both in principle to describe vulnerable children, and in the way that it was used during the pandemic. Can you explain why, please?

Ms Indra Morris: It’s partly due to conversations I’ve had with children and young people themselves after the pandemic about their sense that it defined them rather than reflecting the fact that they were experiencing issues and challenges and adversity that wasn’t to do with them, that was outside their control. And I think I said in my statement there’s a sort of language perspective, but there’s also, as we saw, we’ll maybe come on to later in respect of attendance, the association of stigma, and “Is this me? What does it say about me? And should I attend school? Or do I even associate with the language?” So, yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: We’ll come on, as you say, to talk about that particular policy in some more detail but in your mind would there be a better way of describing this group of children other than using the term “vulnerable children”?

Ms Indra Morris: Well, again, I think there’s a conversation to be had with children and young people and some of those conversations that I’ve had has been about the request to describe them as “facing” or “experiencing” adversity or disadvantage, or even perhaps more neutrally, “children in need of support” or “receiving support”.

Counsel Inquiry: I see. Thank you.

During your evidence we will continue to use the term “vulnerable children” simply because that was the contemporary term.

Ms Indra Morris: Yes, and it had its advantages at the time.

Counsel Inquiry: Ms Morris, we have heard from a number in witnesses in this module so far that in their view there was an insufficient focus across government on children, and some have said that insofar as the Department for Education is the location of much of the business of children’s lives in government, it perhaps did not have a big enough voice beyond its own immediate remit.

We understand from your statement that part of what was novel about the work that your workstream did was that it sought to do exactly that: to work right across government. Is that right? Is it fair to describe it as “novel”?

Ms Indra Morris: Yes, to a point, but I think also in my statement I said we built on some pre-existing work and relationships and those were probably strongest, for example with the Home Office, where we shared statutory responsibilities around safeguarding and shared interests. So they, for example, led on online harms, criminal exploitation and so forth, and there was a lot of work with them. Likewise, there was a Family Justice Board so we worked very closely with the MoJ in the run-up to the pandemic.

So I think it varied but it was completely novel in that we hadn’t worked together in the sort of extreme context of a pandemic.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. And I think we understand from your statement that you first established the Vulnerable Children’s Unit within your group, so within the Department for Education, on 17 March 2020, but that a short time later, you say you think it may have been around 26 March, you suggested at a Cabinet Office meeting that there needed to be more of a focus across government on protecting children during the pandemic, and you felt that you were told that it was unlikely that that would be a focus.

Can you explain that, please? What was it that you were suggesting and why?

Ms Indra Morris: I think my question, and I’m sorry that I can’t remember exactly the – which meeting it was, but it was, it will have been a gathering of directors generals and permanent secretaries, with the leads from the cab – senior Cabinet Office was basically “What about children?” I mean, it was a very simple kind of question and the response was basically: we’re focusing on a health pandemic, children are not at the same risk – are not at risk in the same way.

Counsel Inquiry: Okay. We understand from your statement that then, on 4 April, you were appointed the senior responsible officer, and I think I understand that at some point in its lifetime, the Vulnerable Children’s Unit was reoriented to be reporting to the Cabinet Office?

Ms Indra Morris: That’s not – on the reporting, that’s not quite right, and maybe I should come back to that. But yeah, we set up the Vulnerable Children’s Unit, as you said, before I was appointed SRO. We didn’t know what was coming but we knew and got a sense that it would be fluid and uncertain, that we needed to think about how we could coordinate effectively across government for vulnerable children.

I was appointed as SRO in an email –

Counsel Inquiry: Forgive me, I’m sorry, for those not acquainted with the structures of the Civil Service, is there a particular significance to appointing an SRO?

Ms Indra Morris: Sorry, so it’s a senior responsible officer, and it’s essentially the term used quite widely to describe who is responsible for delivering on something specific. And the Cabinet Office appointed about 40 senior responsible officers across government, in a range of issues. Two were in the Department for Education, one in schools, who was charged with creating places for key worker children, and I was appointed SRO for vulnerable children, but solely with safeguarding. There was no mention in that of attendance. And we went back the same day and basically redrew that and inserted attendance of vulnerable children.

It was not unusual, that was the approach at the time. Cabinet Office were holding the ring and did throughout, in terms of they were, if you like, the clearing house for decisions and coordination for the Covid response. So that wasn’t entirely – that – it didn’t stop the fact that, within DfE, there was also governance, there was a Covid board, and also we set up our own dedicated vulnerable children governance too.

Counsel Inquiry: I see. So, just so I’m sure I understand, your unit would be sitting within DfE, working across government, escalating issues up to Cabinet Office –

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: – is that right?

Ms Indra Morris: Yes, shared as well with the governance in place at the time, which changed over time, within DfE. So we were all, you know, sharing information across the department.

Counsel Inquiry: I see. Thank you.

And you suggest in your statement that you think the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, then Sir Michael Gove, and his adviser, whom you say you think was on loan from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, may have had some role in the rethink about the focus to be placed on children; is that right?

Ms Indra Morris: Well, I had – I mean, I may be drawing too much into coincidence but I had some direct contact from that adviser when she had either gone on loan or is about to go on loan from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner. So, yeah, I saw that as a sort of positive.

Counsel Inquiry: I see. And you felt you had some element of endorsement in that work from Sir Michael Gove; is that right?

Ms Indra Morris: I wouldn’t go as far as that. I didn’t get a sort of explicit – but the fact that that adviser had gone back and was working – now working for him on secondment, and was – had a history and had been in touch with me about vulnerable children, I saw as encouraging.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

To help us then understand the initial work of that unit, can we please look at INQ000540850.

This was, I think, or was this, a sort of presentation of your workstream on 17 April 20?

Ms Indra Morris: It was. This was – forgive me, I can’t remember all the acronyms. This was a Cabinet Office-convened ministerial meeting, and that was one of the key mechanisms for discretion and decision. And Vicky Ford, who was then Minister for Children and Families, attended and presented for us. And the VCU, the Vulnerable Children’s Unit, produced – will have produced this pack for her.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

I think you said it was a key mechanism for discretion and decision. What does that mean?

Ms Indra Morris: Sorry, I meant discussion and decision –

Counsel Inquiry: I see, I’m sorry, that was my error.

Ms Indra Morris: – apologies, no, it’s mine –

Counsel Inquiry: No, not at all.

Ms Indra Morris: – I apologise for my clumsiness.

Counsel Inquiry: If we can look, then, please, at page 2 of this, we see under “Objectives” what the purpose of this presentation was. We see it was to provide an update to share the vulnerable children dashboard and to ask for support from other departments.

Was this updating the Cabinet Office, then? Is this is an illustration of, as we say, sitting in the DfE but reporting up?

Ms Indra Morris: This would – this was a meeting where other government department ministers were at. So Cabinet Office convened it and Cabinet Office would have been there, but the Home Office – I’ll be honest, I haven’t gone back and looked at who actually attended but other government departments. This was not us having a bilateral conversation with the Cabinet Office, this was a cross-government ministerial meeting.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. Can we look, then, please, at page 3.

We see the structure here of your work –

Ms Indra Morris: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – so looking first at attendance, then at safeguarding, then at recovery. And I think you’ve told us that it was you who went back and said, “Actually, we need to include attendance”?

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Is that because you saw attendance as part of safeguarding in these circumstances?

Ms Indra Morris: Yes, but also, it just seemed odd that there was no mention of the attendance of vulnerable children in either the schools’ SRO remit or mine, given Secretary of State and the Permanent Secretary had secured the agreement to keep schools open for those children.

Counsel Inquiry: You say it seemed odd. Is that an oversight or does it perhaps denote a lack of understanding?

Ms Indra Morris: It’s hard for me to say. Possibly a bit of both, but that’s a bit speculative on my part.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. And we understand that subsequently, you redesigned these pillars so that you had, I think it was “wellbeing” and “attainment” instead of “recovery”?

Ms Indra Morris: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: So separate from that –

Ms Indra Morris: – from June. Yeah, June 2020.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Can we look, please, at page 8 of this same presentation. This is, I think, an illustration as you understood it at that stage of the scope and scale of the task of this unit. And if we can look particularly at the bottom line here, we see the numbers of children whom you understood to be in various categories of vulnerability. I want to ask you about the number of 1.9 million, so the estimate of children living in high risk households. Are you able to help us, please, with what living in high risk households means, there?

Ms Indra Morris: Yes, and this was the front page, or one of the front pages of the dashboard that we’d specifically created for vulnerable children that allowed us to see a snapshot of the national picture and then look at individual local authorities and the number of factors.

This data, and the narrow measure, refers to work that the Children’s Commissioner had done specifically around what’s called the toxic trio. I think the work was 19 – 2018, my apologies if that’s a year or so out. And this was recognising that there – the number of children who live in a household where an adult has at least one issue, for example, in the toxic trio, which are recognised as potential drivers for the need for support and intervention of care system: domestic violence, parental mental health, parental substance abuse. There’s a – it’s called narrow measure there. We had a discussion with the Office of the Children’s Commissioner analyst because they owned this data, and we wanted to have comparable data so the 1.9 reflected the data they’d used that we could correlate, if you like, with our local authority-level data, which is what we were doing.

Counsel Inquiry: We had evidence at the – or close to the beginning of these hearings from Baroness Longfield –

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: – about her data in the childhood vulnerability in England report from 2019.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: The figure that that report had given for children living in at risk families was 2.3 million?

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Had you, do you think, taken a narrower measure of her headline figure?

Ms Indra Morris: We did, but again, it comes back to the point that this 1.9 was – reflected the local authority-level data so there was a kind of technical analyst discussion about whether we were using – talking about on similar terms. I think there’s a wider issue and a wider challenge from the Children’s Commissioner about whether we cast the definition of “vulnerable” to “narrowly”, full stop, but actually, I think in this case it was a very sensible decision about data.

Counsel Inquiry: It would seem at first blush as though around 400,000 children somewhere fell out between her count of 2.3 and your count of 1.9; is that right? Or are we misunderstanding?

Ms Indra Morris: I think it comes back to the – going into the pandemic, there wasn’t, if you like, a sort of government-recognised definition of “vulnerable children”, for the purposes of the pandemic and particularly for the purposes of attendance, we focused on children in need and children with an EHCP who were the children that the DfE in particular had responsibility for. In a safeguarding perspective, we recognise that there were also children that we didn’t know about and that’s where the hidden harms work came in.

The Children’s Commissioner had a completely legitimate view but it wasn’t the one that government took, which was there’s a much wider group of children here, and that’s where I think that comes in.

Counsel Inquiry: So do you think hers is a legitimate challenge, then?

Ms Indra Morris: It’s a legitimate challenge but I think for the purposes of attendance, I think at that point in the pandemic, when we – at one point didn’t know if we were actually going to get agreement to anything other than key worker children going into school, and it wasn’t clear what the capacity of schools and their ability to open and support children was. I think we took a sort of principled and sensible approach.

That doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a legitimate challenge, and there is obviously this wider question about wider vulnerabilities and impacts, but I think for the purposes of attendance, but also as I said, for safeguarding we weren’t bound or limited to children with educational, health and care plans or children in need.

Counsel Inquiry: I see. Thank you.

Can we look, please, then at page 6 of this same document. This tell us what I think you were presenting, then, in mid-April as the support that you needed from other government departments. And we see, Ms Morris, that’s quite wide-ranging. So if we look, please, at number 1, safeguarding all vulnerable children and young people, we see that you were asking for support across DfE, Department for Health and Social Care, and the Home Office. You were also asking for support from the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government related to the troubled families programme. Lower down, on supporting vulnerable families, there was help needed from the Cabinet Office, DEFRA, Department of Health and Social Care, and also the Ministry of Justice related to the family courts.

Moving down to the third point we see again, Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government and Her Majesty’s Treasury. And more detail further down including, at the bottom: we need the support of Department for Work and Pensions.

I think pausing there, not on this line, but apparent from your statement, it also became clear that you needed the support from the Home Office related to the registration of births. Also further support from the Ministry of Justice related to the education of children in youth offending institutions, and elsewhere mention of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport on youth services; is that right?

Ms Indra Morris: Yes, that’s right.

Counsel Inquiry: It’s quite clear from that, Ms Morris, that, as we said at the beginning, the location of responsibilities to do with aspects of children’s lives was spread very widely across government. How did that affect your ability to do your role for children in these emergency circumstances?

Ms Indra Morris: I think it’s fair to say it’s probably worth reflecting that this list was drawn up in consultation with colleagues across government who attended at the beginning daily sitreps with the – situation reports – basically, sort of, huddles or what we were learning with the VCU, but also from our discussions with external stakeholders and charity CEOs and others. So we were trying to sort of pull together.

Some of these things will have been things that colleagues in other government departments will say, “Can you kind of advocate and help bolster our case for support?” And we saw some of that translate earlier in the year.

The concern about babies under 1 and – the Home Office, under item 1, for example, was very well shared with the Home Office at that time. So yeah, sorry, I think I might have slightly lost track of your question.

Counsel Inquiry: Not at all. Let me ask you more specifically by reference to what you say in your statement.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: One of the things you say is that:

“Due to the lack of an existing cross-government plan or structure for a pandemic, cooperation on issues affecting vulnerable children was reliant on goodwill and finding good people in different departments.”

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Does that indicate that if you couldn’t find someone in a particular department who was receptive to your concern, it would be hard to progress things with that department?

Ms Indra Morris: Yes. I think we were all, I think, the fundamental failure was the lack of pre-pandemic planning. I think as SRO, in hindsight, I wish I had – and I think I mention one of these in my statement – asked for named officials in individual departments. I, actually, in hindsight, also wish I’d asked for named ministers because I think that would have – could have perhaps helped. We found it easier where we had a pre-existing relationship, and I mentioned the Home Office, and so forth already.

It was harder in departments that didn’t have so much of a working relationship or didn’t have such a clear pre-established agenda, so DCMS on youth, which we might come to when we talk about teens later.

Counsel Inquiry: So when you say you wish or you think it may have helped if you had asked for named officials and named ministers, again, for those not familiar with Civil Service processes –

Ms Indra Morris: Sorry.

Counsel Inquiry: – not at all – but what does that mean? What difference would that have made?

Ms Indra Morris: I think it would have said to the Cabinet Office – I think it would have told me something about where the Cabinet Office were at in terms of seeing this as something they wanted the cross-government kind of machinery and effort to focus on. And I think it would have – in some cases it was obvious who the minister was, you know, Victoria Atkins in the Home Office, for example. But I think it would also have helped, perhaps, us escalate or focus on some of the conversations, whether at ministerial level or official level, although I had, you know, my counterparts in different departments who I did go to at various points – and provided some continuity, and continuity was quite important.

Counsel Inquiry: So, in really simple terms, it would be somebody within that department who didn’t necessarily have, as part of their usual day-to-day work, responsibility for children, but who would be appointed to work with you on any issues that you raised; is that right?

Ms Indra Morris: Or did already, and would be appointed, or if they didn’t but we felt that their department had some potential positive influence that – they would be nominated, yes, to be part of that.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. That may speak to another thing that you say in your statement, which is that:

“… departments are always most interested in the areas for which they have primary responsibility. This was particularly so in the context of the pandemic where everyone was faced with trying to respond to the varied challenges raised and a rapidly changing factual picture. It is easier to galvanise people in a shared structure, and I felt this improved as the [Vulnerable Children’s Unit] bedded in.”

So can we take it from that and what you said a moment ago, that the points you were making about children were competing for attention in other departments?

Ms Indra Morris: I mean definitely, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. And if we can just, please, explore an example of how you were or perhaps were not able to raise an issue that you felt was of importance.

Can we look, please, at INQ000624437.

This is an email of 19 November 2020, so quite some way into the work of the Vulnerable Children’s Unit, and it appears to me, please correct me if I’m wrong, as if this is part of regular reporting on the delivery of the programme –

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: – from your unit to the Cabinet Office.

We see:

“SRO Summary:

“Delivery confidence reflects cohort vulnerability to seasonal risk and restrictions.”

And so on.

“[Vulnerable children] attendance falling …”

And so on.

We see lower down:

“Developing bespoke escalation for LAs that hit threshold levels or self-report concerns …”

And we’ll come on to look at some of that in a moment, but if we can look, then, at the following box, “Escalations”, is this the section where you would tell the Cabinet Office where you needed support –

Ms Indra Morris: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – in other departments? Thank you.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah. And this, as you say, was sent to the Cabinet Office but it was sent alongside the schools SRO report as well, via the central DfE.

Counsel Inquiry: I see. Thank you.

And just taking that final bullet point here then as an example, “Continued need for MoJ support to protect and improve family court capacity to prevent children blocked in system”, what would then happen to this escalation?

Ms Indra Morris: I mean, that is a very good question, and sometimes one we asked ourselves. It felt to me that the Home Office – sorry, not the Home Office, the Cabinet Office machinery, if you like, was much better at decisions that related to pandemic – very pandemic-specific issues, like testing or PPE, although we found that very frustrating as well.

This issue, which was a pre-existing issue before the pandemic, was one that we raised continuously throughout.

Counsel Inquiry: And just pausing there, did you feel it was a pandemic issue as well?

Ms Indra Morris: No, I felt it was a pre-pandemic issue that was being exacerbated, and we have seen that, we saw that, the President of the Family Division saw that very early and moved to put some arrangements in place. This was actually two – I think a day before the Spending Review was published, and there was some funding in there to help with the justice system, including the Family Court recovery. But I think I was still escalating this on Christmas Eve because we were having conversations with the local authorities who were saying: we’re really struggling with placement capacity and this backlog is having an impact. And I think you’ve heard also from some other witnesses about how it was for families as well.

Counsel Inquiry: So is the answer to the question, then, what would happen after you escalated it, that you would continue to work on it, but – I don’t want to put words in your – is it fair to say you wouldn’t know to what degree it was being progressed elsewhere?

Ms Indra Morris: I think you either – it felt a bit like you either got a very clear decision, so, for example, like, you know, can we get PPE to social workers or children’s homes, or you may have got a follow-up. And I think there was a meeting later that month with the taskforce, the Cabinet Office taskforce, to go through some of the, kind of, outstanding issues, which I think is one of your exhibits as well, or it wouldn’t be – you got a sense it wouldn’t be picked up and it would be unclear.

But some departments would say to us: Just keep – keep it on the table, keep it sort of – keep the focus.

Because it helped strengthen their arm.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. Just before we leave these structural points then – thank you, this can come down – it has been suggested to the Inquiry that this difficulty of raising and coordinating issues across government would also be a problem in a future pandemic?

Ms Indra Morris: (Witness nodded)

Counsel Inquiry: And some witnesses ask the Chair to make a recommendation that there should be a cabinet-level minister for children or some other mechanism in order to resolve that issue. Given your experience of working to bring these issues together during the pandemic, what do you think we would need to be better prepared for this in a future pandemic?

Ms Indra Morris: I mean, I think that’s a legitimate suggestion, but I don’t think it would work on its own. The political agenda of the government matters, so what the prime minister decides is a priority really matters here.

I think I’ve said in my statement, you referred to it earlier, that incentives are often to kind of focus in on your own department. I think if you had a single minister, my worry would be that they would have no influence or levers over their colleagues, so you’d have to think about – for example, again, it comes back to my point about should I have asked for a named minister – named ministers too, in other government departments. But not just that; some shared, perhaps, outcome measures, particular clarity about their duties towards children, and a kind of shared, kind of, agenda, really, supported by good data.

But again, crucially, through the lens of the child, not just the system. We have a very sector-focused, service-focused, way of doing things, and I think in the past we’ve had, for example, a child poverty unit, there’s been the social exclusion unit. You know, over time – there’s the Minister for Women and Equalities. I think some learning about – and I haven’t looked at this myself, but some learning about what has worked well and what hasn’t worked in those situations could be very useful in designing something.

Counsel Inquiry: I see. So would you advocate for any particular structural change, or is it your position that a workstream like yours, but with greater clarity about accountability, would suffice?

Ms Indra Morris: In the context of a pandemic, or more broadly?

Counsel Inquiry: In the context of any civil emergency.

Ms Indra Morris: Um … yes, I think it would be even more vital in the context of a civil emergency, particularly if it’s a health pandemic, where children are not seen as the kind of – at the same level of direct health risk.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you very much, Ms Morris, for your help on those structural points.

I’d like, then, to come to ask you more specifically about some of the Vulnerable Children’s Unit’s work, and first of all with the objective of implementing the policy of getting vulnerable children into schools.

Beginning, then, with planning for that policy, you’ll have seen, I think, the witness statement of Mr Jonathan Slater provided for this module.

Ms Indra Morris: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Slater, of course, was the Permanent Secretary at the Department for Education in the early part of the pandemic.

We don’t need to go to his statement, but for the transcript, the reference for it is INQ000588040, and it’s page 9 that I’m going to ask Ms Morris about.

Mr Slater said that:

“Prior to 18 March … the government’s focus was on keeping schools open …”

Ms Indra Morris: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: He said:

“… we were not assessing other potential implications or risks of mass closures.”

He said that:

“… the government’s approach to schools changed completely (literally) overnight. It became clear to me and my senior DfE colleagues on the evening of 17 March 2020 that the government’s intention was now that schools were about to be closed to all but key workers.”

And he says that the policies for vulnerable children to attend school were worked up overnight on 17th March 2020 and presented to Number 10 on

Is that also your recollection, Ms Morris, that there was very limited planning for school closures?

Ms Indra Morris: Yes, that’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: And no planning for this policy until the night of 17 March?

Ms Indra Morris: (No audible response).

Counsel Inquiry: We had evidence from Sir Jon Coles earlier in these

hearings. He described feeling some shock at that state

of affairs, and he said that it was, in his opinion,

a dereliction of duty, both of politicians and the

department. What is your view about that?

Ms Indra Morris: Well, I’m – when I look back and think about the fact

that my team, for example, were asked in February to do

some work on what the impact for children’s social care

would be, you know, I’ve asked myself: why didn’t I spot

that as a trigger, if you like, to start thinking about

what planning did we need to do and think more broadly?

Now, I wasn’t alone in that but actually I do think

I missed it, I missed an opportunity.

I just – I can’t really say why we didn’t see it

coming. I’ve kind of gone over that question a number

of times. I’ve, you know, COBR, which has been

mentioned a few times, does have quite a kind of culture

of confidentiality sometimes so I wonder if there wasn’t March 2020. 18 the sort of dissemination. But it just wasn’t – it was

sort of on our radar but it wasn’t on our – there

wasn’t a sort of imperative or urgency or a sense of

actually what was about to hit everybody.

Counsel Inquiry: You referred a moment ago to your officials being asked

to do some planning for children’s social care.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Where did that request come from?

Ms Indra Morris: That was the Cabinet Office.

Counsel Inquiry: That was the Cabinet Office?

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah, that was the Cabinet Office, yeah. So there wasn’t – you know, there was a modicum of planning, or a modicum of first-level “what might the impacts of X, Y, Z be?” But that was it. And as I said, you know, I do reflect why didn’t I see that as an opportunity to kind of or, you know, a driver to convene my team earlier to kind of think through what some of the scenarios might have been.

Counsel Inquiry: Was there a realisation at the time, perhaps, on 17 and 18 March, that this was going to be enormous and there hadn’t been any planning for it?

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

In terms of the messaging, the public communication about the policy for vulnerable children attending school, you’ve already given us some of your views about the language on vulnerable children. We heard evidence last week from a director of children’s services for Kent County Council specifically, who shared her view that the way that the policy was communicated in fact led to some anger among parents who felt that there was a punitive element to being identified as somebody who needed to send their child to school at a time when the public was being told it was safer to stay home.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: What do you think about the early messaging on the policy?

Ms Indra Morris: It’s very hard to reconcile a “stay at home, save lives message” with a “But we really care about you so please come to school”. And that anger, you know, I recognise that anger, I had some of those conversations with parents’ groups myself, particularly, actually, in respect of children with education, care home plans and disabilities, but yeah, I recognise that tension.

Counsel Inquiry: It may be that there’s no easy answer, but what should the message have been?

Ms Indra Morris: I’m – I genuinely am not sure. I wonder, there’s a bit of me, and it comes back to the comms and engagements, whereas we could have thought a bit differently about how we did the level down communication, but I think it would be very hard to counter and probably not responsible to counter and crowd out the overall public health messaging, but maybe we could have been – had a little bit more empathy in our – in the tone of our, some of our kind of communications. We were very kind of – we tried to do that in conversations and discussions but I wonder, again, if we’d thought differently about our comms and engagement across it, whether we could have kind of acknowledged that at a more kind of – at a more magnified level.

Counsel Inquiry: You referred a moment ago to – I think you said anger particularly on the part of parents whose children had an education, health and care plan.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Do you think that the focus on safety in the messaging may particularly have discouraged the attendance of disabled children?

Ms Indra Morris: Possibly. I mean, it’s quite hard to disentangle, there was a, sort of, you know, school is a protective factor from a safeguarding perspective but school is also a way of continuing provision and support for children, including those in special schools, although that’s the minority of EHCP children. So yeah. I recognise, but I think the fundamental issue was, you know, is it safe?

Counsel Inquiry: So that possibility of softer messaging on the one hand?

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: On the other hand, conceivably, attendance for some children might have been mandated. We read from the witness statement of Ms Vicky Ford, and again, I don’t need to take you there, but of course Ms Ford was Minister for Children and Families at the time.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: She tells us that the focus of the policy was on safeguarding but that the attendance of vulnerable children was not made mandatory because there would be some children caught by the definition who nonetheless did not need to attend, for safeguarding reasons?

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: And she gives the example of a child potentially settled in a long-term foster care arrangements whose needs might be very well met in placement.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: What is your view on the possibility of mandating? Do you think it’s right not to have mandated anyone’s attendance?

Ms Indra Morris: I think it is right, actually, and I have thought about that, you know, in a kind of, you know, what could we have done to have got more children in? And of course mandation was suspended for all children at that point and for a while, but I think again it comes back to schools and – schools and in particular local authorities know their children. You know, they are best placed to work with the parents and carers, the social workers, the teachers, to work out, actually, who is going to be best to come into school, and are there clinically vulnerable risks that actually mean we shouldn’t be? And so I think discretion, although it has its downsides, I think that was the right thing to do.

Counsel Inquiry: On that point of schools and local authorities knowing their children best, one of the points that the Director of Children’s Services at Kent made to us was that if local government had been consulted about the policy of vulnerable children attending, they may have been able to give some caution around the messaging and the potential anger of those families because they work so intimately with so many families who would have qualified. Do we take it from your answers about – your answers to questions about planning that there just was no thought given to consultation with local government or others?

Ms Indra Morris: Well, there was very little planning in central government. Good planning would have been both central government with local government, and with others, not just central government on its own. So I don’t think it would have changed the anger if the policy had been the same. I think we’d still needed to have worked through that. And of course, it was anger mixed with anxiety. You know, it was incredibly scary times for parents and carers, and children and young people, and for professionals, you know, whose sort of professional lives have been thrown upside down.

Counsel Inquiry: Coming, then, to the implementation of the policy, in terms of where the responsibility lay for identifying vulnerable children, and encouraging their attendance at school, we’ve already seen during these hearings that the Department for Education’s guidance situated that responsibility jointly with schools and with local authorities.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: I won’t ask you to look at it, I expect you’re very familiar with it.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: And we know that it became your unit’s job to support that exercise. Was it then a surprise for the department, for the Vulnerable Children’s Unit, to find that in March and April and May, so few children were attending?

Ms Indra Morris: I’m not sure if we were surprised, because I’m not sure we had any idea how many would attend, if I’m honest. But it was – we felt it was too low, and I think that was a view shared by schools and local government, as well, and that we should work together to try to get that number up.

Counsel Inquiry: And coming on, then, to how you did that, we know that there had very close to the pandemic, so June 2019, there had been a report for the Department for Education that expressed concern about the systems for sharing information.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: And said that they were not wholly reliable, that there was no consistency on how information is shared, is held, and in particular this was as between local authorities and schools. I think that report found that schools know when a child has an allocated social worker but they may not know that a child is receiving early help or is a child in need. Did that prove to be a problem?

Ms Indra Morris: I think you might be referring to the Child in Need Review –

Counsel Inquiry: Yes.

Ms Indra Morris: – that my team did and was published by the government in, I think, June 2019. Information sharing has long been a big focus because repeatedly, when lessons are being learned, there’s usually some breakdown in information sharing. This specific axis, if you like, between schools and local authorities, we were not – no – issues on that weren’t escalated to us. It felt like information sharing was much more an issue between police, health, social workers and schools. And in fact I think I said in my statement in at least one – more than one local authority where historically the relationship between local authorities and some of the schools had in particular not been great. It felt like that all those historic tensions went out of the window as they basically worked together and focused on their children.

Counsel Inquiry: So would it right to say then that you weren’t concerned that the problem limiting attendance numbers was in that identification?

Ms Indra Morris: No, we did – the extent to which they were sharing information was talked about but it was never identified as a barrier.

Counsel Inquiry: Okay.

Can we look, please, at INQ000546957. This is a survey conducted by this inquiry for the Local Government Association, and if we look, please, at page 39, I wonder if this tell us something about how local authorities were going about organising themselves for this exercise. We read that only one in four councils who responded to the survey outlined their regular contact and monitoring of vulnerable children, covering reviewing vulnerable children’s attendance. We read later down that page that only one in five reported individual in-depth council liaison with school heads.

We read over the page, please, on page 40, that only one in five highlighted organising a central list of vulnerable children. And only one in five reviewed individual child plans and risk assessments to help them to assess what each child needed and the prioritisation of vulnerable children attending schools.

Thank you, that can come down now.

Ms Morris, it would seem from this that there was quite a significant degree of variation in practice among local authorities. What is your view about why that was the case?

Ms Indra Morris: I think there are two questions here: one is the variation in practice, and yes, I recognise that, and there is a perennial issue with devolved services about how much you prescribe and standardise and the approach and the relationship with DfE, and schools and local government is such that it’s usually done through guidance, some of it statutory, some of it not.

When I first looked at that, I was a bit taken aback and my question was: why is there the discrepancy, the sort of one in five, one in four, between what we were seeing and hearing and what that says, but I went back to the original question and it was a question about pre March 18 planning, and it asked those people who said they had done some pre March 18 planning, then what they had done. So if you’d said “yes”, you got to ask this free text.

So I think this is a useful example, but I think we risk kind of misreading.

That said, I’m not sitting here and saying every council did this in a way – or that we knew every council were doing this in the most effective way, and I think I mentioned in my statement the kind of pandemic context for the relationship team of central government and local government is really vital, and that links to data and the willingness and the ability and the architecture around data collection.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. Let me just unpack that.

Ms Indra Morris: Sorry.

Counsel Inquiry: Not at all. I think there were a few things there. I think you said that list of returns, and we will check again what exactly that relates to.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: You say that doesn’t correlate with your experience. So was it your experience that actually local authorities were much more organised than that would suggest?

Ms Indra Morris: The examples resonate. It was the one in four, one in five, that low number didn’t resonate.

Counsel Inquiry: I see.

Ms Indra Morris: And I think if it had been that drastic an issue, given how often, you know, we were talking particularly through REACT to schools and local authorities, we would have known with confidence. That’s not to say it never came up as an issue but it wasn’t a sort of – yeah, it wasn’t widespread.

Counsel Inquiry: My question from that was going to be: if there was such a degree of variation, I accept you’re saying that you don’t think there was, does that suggest there needs to be more coordination from the centre? I think you’re saying that’s a perennial problem and it’s very difficult to say?

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah, and we did analyse variations. So earlier we talked about the dashboard, and you put up the front page. Behind that sits a RAG rating of each local authority according to the relative attendance of vulnerable children with children in need and children with an EHCP and other factors. So there was variation, and that was one of the points of discussion with individual local authorities and with local authority, kind of, leadership organisations, if you like.

So we know there’s variation. I think what’s harder to know is what – when is variation a problem versus when is variation somebody finding just as an effective way to do what they want to do locally?

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Can we look then, please, at INQ000546826, which is one of the situation reports from the Vulnerable Children and Young People unit, again from November, so quite far in. And we understand from your statement that at this stage the data collection that you have stressed was up and running and the data available was really quite rich and detailed.

Can we look then at page 3, please, and I should say this report is very data rich, and it is 15 pages long and we won’t go through all of it, but we can see here the nature of it, I think. We can see on the left-hand side a summary of the data.

Ms Indra Morris: Mm-hm.

Counsel Inquiry: And this is data about the number of vulnerable children that were attending or the proportion, rather, and then we can see on the right-hand side, please, a translation of what was being done and what needed to be done around that.

And just noticing briefly the final bullet point: “Work with x-government partners to consider lessons learned from previous tilting of government programmes …”

Two points here, I think. This suggests that that cross-government work that we looked at from the beginning, from April, that was continuing all the way through, was it?

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah, I mean, you know, as you’ve seen, you know, attendance is higher than we started but it’s still not where we want it to be. So I think it’s fair to say that the focus was pretty relentless and uninterrupted throughout.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. And then that penultimate bullet point:

“Explore options to work with partner organisations to understand best local authorities in local authorities/multi-academy trusts/settings with strong performance …”

We understand from your statement that a lot of that was carried out by the REACT teams?

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: So who were phoning and having meetings with local authorities regularly, it seems, to find out what was going on in terms of attendance in their areas.

From your perspective, did that work of contacting them directly to talk through those issues have a significant impact on attendance in their areas?

Ms Indra Morris: I think it’s really hard to claim that it did. I’m not sure what – but equally, you know, having a conversation, I had some of those conversations myself about “Well, your attendance is, you know, much lower” or “Your attendance is higher, why? What are you doing? Can we help?” is a really important conversation to have and a really point of not just learning for the kind of, if you like, the national picture but actually about: Does this local authority recognise they’ve got a problem? Can we help? What could help?

And I think that’s incredibly important.

I suppose I would say on best practice, this is one of the things, again, as the SRO, that I think could I have tried to create some capacity sooner to codify that best practice more and share it more widely? There was some pre-existing – there was some pre-existing work focused on persistent absence, pre-pandemic, but obviously this was a much wider and bigger issue.

Counsel Inquiry: We see there local authorities, multi-academy trusts, and settings with strong performance.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: In your experience, was there a difference or a significant difference in approaches to attendance as between multi-academy trusts, perhaps large multi-academy trusts on the one hand, and local authority-maintained schools on the other?

Ms Indra Morris: Oh gosh, I couldn’t say. I’m sorry, yeah. I can’t help on that.

It was quite hard, we might come to an exhibit later that gives a sense of some of the factors, but I didn’t look at the local authority-maintained versus academy.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. That can come down now. Thank you.

It’s been suggested to the Inquiry by one local authority that whilst that local authority was providing REACT with a great deal of information and detail about their experiences and perhaps what was and wasn’t working for them, they felt that they weren’t getting a great deal of detailed guidance and information from REACT. Is that something you recognise?

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah, I have some sympathy with that. I mean there is a limit to what new things, I guess, REACT had to share. There was also a degree of – there was a sort of interesting dynamic in a way with local authority which was both sort of, you know, “Tell us”, at times, and I’m slightly being a bit crude about this – “Tell us what to do but also leave us alone to get on with our job”, which I can sort of sympathise with as well. But I think also individual local authorities, and maybe we didn’t explain enough that collectively the insight from each of them was also informing how we were sort of prioritising asks, some of which we talked about earlier, because again in my statement I said schools and local authorities cannot do this alone, even outside a pandemic, but particularly, you know, it’s also about the police, it’s also about health and others too.

Counsel Inquiry: And just taking one, perhaps, granular example of practice in individual areas, we know that for children who had an education, health and care plan, whether they could attend school depended on the outcome of a risk assessment –

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: – by either their local authority or their school. And that for children without such a plan, but who ordinarily had special educational needs support, whether they could attend depended on whether they were categorised probably by their school –

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: – as otherwise vulnerable.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Was the work of the data collection for the unit able to get that sort of richness of detail to understand whether that aspect of the policy was working or not?

Ms Indra Morris: The attendance of EHCP children or the risk assessment?

Counsel Inquiry: The risk assessment.

Ms Indra Morris: I mean, it was an interesting one, and we did actually collect some data, I think it was in June, on this. But there was quite a lively discussion about whether we could and should, partly for the reason I explained earlier, is I think local authorities were pretty cross at times with the data we were asking, although I felt it was proportionate and reasonable. And my point is twofold. One is, if we are to help local authorities and others, we need to know what’s going on. And the second is, actually it’s not unreasonable to ask for transparency and assurance that the things that are – you know, are happening actually are happening. And – so, yeah, it wasn’t a sort of regular and routine.

We also had some discussions, for example, and meetings with special schools, some of whom that said their local authority had delegated the risk assessment to them. So there was a bit of a sense that local authorities – yeah, sorry. I could go on. But that won’t be helpful.

Counsel Inquiry: It’s been suggested that some parents didn’t feel that the schools were assessing properly, or that – in fact, it’s been suggested that local authorities weren’t able to press or challenge schools if they felt that the assessment outcome was the wrong one for that individual child.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Is that something that, centrally, there was any intention to provide guidance for, or direct?

Ms Indra Morris: There was guidance on doing the risk assessment, and I think there was a good practice guidance issued as well. My apologies, I can’t remember the date of that. I suppose my question would be: was that – was that parents who wanted their child to attend but felt they weren’t getting their space? Or was that – you know, did that reflect a different view about what was best for the child, I guess would be my question, rather than the risk assessment itself?

Counsel Inquiry: Understood. It’s also been pointed out that the Association of Directors of Children’s Services gave some feedback to the Department for Education that the REACT engagement was relatively weak on issues relating to SEND. Is that something you recollect or recognise?

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah, I saw that, and I think – I mean, REACT was created for the pandemic in the same way that the VCU was, and it was the regional school – led by the regional schools commissioner director and his team, and then parts of my team, particularly children’s social care, improvement, innovation, was sort of, you know, working together with it.

And we recognised right at the outset there were different skills, different experiences, different cultures, and that wasn’t straightforward, necessarily. But I do also wonder if sometimes, when – maybe when my team spoke to local authorities, did they see them as REACT or did they see them as the team that they’d known –

Counsel Inquiry: I see.

Ms Indra Morris: – for a long time? But there is definitely – pre-pandemic, if you’d asked local authorities which bit of the department they had most contact with, it would have been my bit rather than the school’s.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. And last question in respect of the dashboard.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: We understand that the collection for the dashboard, and indeed perhaps the majority of the work of the vulnerable children unit, was about safeguarding vulnerability for the most part. Was there separate monitoring of non-attendance attributable to clinical vulnerability? If you’re not able to help, please do –

Ms Indra Morris: I don’t think so. I don’t think so.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Ms Indra Morris: Though, can I say, the VCU was very closely involved in attendance. REACT was the sort of, if you like, the conduit and the two-way conversation with schools and local authorities, but the VCU was, you know, helping us bring together both the data and the intelligence, including from externals, from charities and parents groups and so forth, and trying to then analyse and triage and work out actually what should we do with it, should we change course, should we do anything new, et cetera.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. And then let’s look at some of the data you had about poor attendance.

If we can look, please, at INQ000624778. Thank you.

This is another situation report, this time from July 2020.

Can we look, please, at page 16 of this.

We understand that you had conducted a survey of some school leaders and that this is what you learned about some of the reasons for non-attendance. I think you alluded to this earlier.

Ms Indra Morris: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: We see from the table at the bottom left that the largest reason was that the parent thinks the child may be exposed to the virus, then the parent refuses to send the child, the household is self-self-isolating, or the parent does not continue – beg your pardon – does not consider their child to be vulnerable.

Just pausing there, do you recall what you made of the return of these results? Was this roughly as you had anticipated?

Ms Indra Morris: It was helpful, and I think this survey was done through REACT, but this was helpful in a sense of trying to get some sense, albeit from a relatively small sample size, of, if you like, the kind of – the mix and the relative weight of different factors to help us test. Because when you’re also hearing a lot of feedback, you know, you have to also attest that you’re not just hearing the loudest voices. So it was a very useful kind of – almost a kind of – you know, what does – you know, does this tell us anything new? Does it change anything? What’s this telling us? What are we learning from it?

Counsel Inquiry: And what was it telling you, can I ask? Because it seems that perhaps the first three one might attribute to the virus to fear and anxiety about Covid-19?

Ms Indra Morris: Yes, and that was definitely a sense all the way through, although early ‘21 was interesting for different reasons. But that was a sense. And when we looked at some of the regional – I think I mentioned in my statement, when we did some of the regional analyses or local analysis of differences as well, at times – not always, but at times there did seem to be a relationship between attendance and Covid prevalence. But I think there’s also something about confidence.

Counsel Inquiry: What do you think that is?

Ms Indra Morris: I think it was very striking that, sort of, later on, I think – I think particularly after all schools had been, sort of, reopened to a wider group of children – I think there’s something very powerful about seeing your peers going back to school, and you’re no longer part of a small sort of special group, who might not feel special. I think there’s something about building confidence. Everybody had been thrown into – you know, I mean, it’s easy to forget, I think, the sort of fear and anxiety there was, particularly early on. So I think there was something about confidence and the passage of time.

I haven’t checked back what the public health messaging was at this time.

And there’s something also about, you know, schools and local authorities never stopped – you know, nobody ever stopped trying. The progress was painfully slow but we all just kept going. So, yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: And we see here parents –

Ms Indra Morris: And – sorry.

Counsel Inquiry: Please.

Ms Indra Morris: “Unable to make the journey to school”, travel. One of the things that was different in – coming up to the return in September was the – some specific work on travel and transport to work. And again, one of the questions I’ve asked myself is: could we have done something on this? Because in our earlier work it was a sort of a barrier to attendance in the first period of closures.

I’m not sure, to be honest, given where we were with the public health, et cetera, we could have done, but it was – I think things like this were really helpful when we were having, as we were at that point, thinking ahead to: what are we learning? What would we do different going forward?

Counsel Inquiry: And some other notable ones here are:

“Parent does not consider their child to be vulnerable.”

Ms Indra Morris: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And:

“Stigma associated with being a [vulnerable child].”

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: And that goes back, I think, to your earlier point about the messaging; is that fair?

Ms Indra Morris: Yes. And also – and we might get on to this bit – in the safeguarding, that there are some parents who choose – and this was pre-pandemic as well – not to cooperate with social services or with schools or – for different reasons. Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Can we look, please, at the following page of this, page 17. This shows us what you learnt about how schools were responding to the issue of non-attendance of vulnerable children.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: And we see at the top:

“Phoning, texting or emailing the parent or carer.”

Then:

“Contacting children’s social care.

“Communication via online learning.”

And so on.

At the bottom:

“Contacting the police.”

Given what you have said about confidence being important, and fear and anxiety having driven some of that non-attendance, what do you make of the response of contacting the police, for example?

Ms Indra Morris: It could have been a very legitimate, particularly – and it may well also have been in conjunction with contacting children’s social care, because obviously these are not sort of necessarily either/or. So, for example, if there is a genuine fear of risk of harm or safeguarding, and particularly if children’s social care couldn’t get access to the home, then the statutory guidance is to seek help from the police.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. So was this set of responses something that you were broadly comfortable with? It didn’t give rise to any concern on your part?

Ms Indra Morris: No, not concern. But of course it doesn’t – it doesn’t tell us anything about the sort of effectiveness or what was kind of appropriate, but yeah, it was useful insight.

Counsel Inquiry: And were you forming a view at this stage about what was effective?

Ms Indra Morris: I mean, “effective” in its broadest term, but we couldn’t – we couldn’t draw a line that said: because this local authority and these schools are doing this, they’re getting –

Counsel Inquiry: Yeah, it wasn’t that clear?

Ms Indra Morris: It wasn’t that clear. Though there was a sense that those should – and I think some of them have said this in evidence, and I mention it in my statement – done the sort of RAG rating collectively and said: Okay, this – we’re more – we’re very worried about this child, and therefore, you know, face-to-face visits is more important and we might do it frequently.

So, yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Last document, then, on this subject, please, Ms Morris.

INQ000542897.

This is another situational report. This time it’s from March 2020, so we’ve moved on considerably in time.

If we can look, please, at page 11, we see – they’re a little difficult to find but they’re just underneath these graphs – the proportion of children then attending in March 2021:

“44% of [all] children with an [education, health and care plan] …”

And:

“49% of children with a social worker …”

So very considerably up from the spring of 2020.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: But still not the majority.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: By this stage, of course, there’d been a vast amount of work done by yourselves in the Vulnerable Children’s Unit, by REACT, by authorities and by schools, we’ve heard from other witnesses.

Why do you think, Ms Morris, we still weren’t seeing the majority attending at this stage?

Ms Indra Morris: This was, I think, still in the second school closure, which I think was January to something like the 8 March 2021. And I think, for me, there is something again about the kind of overall pandemic and health messaging. This was a pack that was for the internal DfE governance for Covid and actually I think after this, there was a big upturn after about 25 March where we went up to about 85% with an EHCP and 82 with a social worker, still too low but significantly higher. And for me, that comes back a little bit to some of the points I touched on earlier: the wider attendance of your peers matters.

Was the grip of the pandemic fear weaker? Although, interestingly, I think prevalence rates were actually higher in this period than they were in the first lockdown, my apologies if I’m not remembering them right – there had been the start of, kind of, you know, greater visible action, if you like, on school safety measures and testing and parental surveys of parents were saying that confidence was sort of going up.

So it was improved but I think, as you say, to me it showed the limits of what was almost the limits of what was possible if you closed to a wider group.

Sorry, that was a bit long.

Counsel Inquiry: So then, perhaps the most difficult question of all, in light of what you’ve just said about the limits of what can be done, if we were to find ourselves on the brink of another civil emergency or another pandemic and there was a need to identify which children were vulnerable perhaps in those new circumstances, and to ensure that they were able to attend a place of safety, is there anything that you think we can learn from your experience of this work to help us in those circumstances?

Ms Indra Morris: I think there are two things. I think one of the things we need to do is not make the mistake of only planning for a pandemic that has the same health risks. I think we also need to plan for a pandemic that may have also high risks to children, and of course children didn’t come out unscathed from this either. I’m a bit uncertain as to what the right – I think the pre-planning of the scenarios is really important. I think this shows us that keeping settings open, or even, perhaps – settings open even if you have a hybrid, in some ways, of face-to-face attendance and online, you know, we’ve got different capabilities, different infrastructure now, we’ve learnt a lot from the experience of the pandemic. Is there a kind of different model of engagement that allows it to be for all children, but flexing what the right kind of approach is?

But I think what we can’t ignore is that, going into the pandemic, the pandemic was a problem, but it also not just increased pressures on families and children and young people, but pressures that already existed on the services to support them. So I think there has to be a serious look at the resilience of those services and the ability to – because the pandemic in a way is not the conditions in which you’re going to fix them. You can mitigate them and we saw that through collaboration, through local authorities and others sharing information, for example, but I think – yeah. Sorry, I’ve … yeah.

Ms Cayoun: Thank you very much.

My Lady, it’s five minutes to the scheduled break. I’m about to move on to a different subject.

Lady Hallett: Yes, of course.

We take a break every so often for everybody’s benefit. I shall return at 11.55.

(11.40 am)

(A short break)

(11.56 am)

Lady Hallett: Ms Cayoun.

Ms Cayoun: Thank you, my Lady.

Thank you, Ms Morris.

Ms Morris, we’re about to move on to the topic of safeguarding. Just before we do, can I please just clarify a point from before the break –

Ms Indra Morris: Yes, of course.

Counsel Inquiry: – which was that I think you said, when we were looking at the figures for attendance in March 2021, that after 25 March, the numbers were much better than those which we had been looking at?

Ms Indra Morris: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: So I think you said 85%, or thereabouts, from 25 March.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: I think it’s right that schools went back, or were reopened to most pupils from 8 March. So did you mean that once almost all children were back at school, that’s when the attendance rates were much better –

Ms Indra Morris: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – for vulnerable children?

Ms Indra Morris: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Ms Indra Morris: And that’s what I meant about the importance of peers or not being singled out or in a small group.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes, thank you very much.

We’ll move, then, to the topic of safeguarding, please.

We have already spoken about how important it was to the Vulnerable Children’s Unit to have that cross-government perspective on issues related to safeguarding. And I want to come to ask you, please, about how well you think the risks to the child protection system were understood across government.

If we can look, please, at INQ000546827.

This is a note of a deep dive into the issues relating to children’s social care. And this was on 27 November 2020, so again quite a long way into our period and, in fact, during the lockdown when we were shortly coming on to talk about another period of school closures.

We see from this cast list, it’s called, I think people attending from right across government; is that right?

Ms Indra Morris: That’s right. It was a Cabinet Office meeting.

Counsel Inquiry: Excellent. Thank you. I appreciate a lot of the names are redacted so I’m asking you from your recollection; would that have been attended by senior civil servants from across government?

Ms Indra Morris: I think, though I can’t be sure, that the names that are not redacted might have been – as you know, that’s wrong because at least one of those is not. Yeah, they will have been civil servants – I think.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. If we can look down, please, at the questions, it says “Cabinet Office questions”.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: And then we see – and actually, these are just a few from quite a long list – questions like: “What are the specific impacts and key risks to the children’s social care system caused by current November restrictions?”

Lower down: “What are the key impacts of Covid on children’s social care system?” And “What are the major risks?”

And if we could perhaps zoom out so we can just get a flavour of how many there were and how detailed they were – thank you. If we can look at page 2, please. We see questions about “Any local authorities which may fail to deliver on their statutory requirements?”. “Capacity in the system”. Question 5: “How does Covid expose vulnerable children to wider harms?” And so on.

And for context, this is a note that accompanies a meeting at which your unit gave a presentation, I think.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Can we take it from this note that these issues would have been discussed in detail with those senior servants from across the government?

Ms Indra Morris: Yes, and some of these questions were questions from the outset so, you know, how does Covid expose vulnerable children to wider harms? You know, this was a meeting in November. We’d already that the hidden harms summit in June. Very, very early on we were saying this was not just about children, that we know, but lockdown could increase harms to others. So these were familiar questions, and it was very helpful that Cabinet Office was also engaging.

Counsel Inquiry: And do you think that these issues were understood across government?

Ms Indra Morris: I think, again, it sort of varied. I think – I got a sense at that point that the Covid taskforce and the Cabinet Office had probably a greater kind of mix of backgrounds and probably understood it. Pre-pandemic, the – both the centre – and when I say Cabinet Office, I also mean Number 10 – and the Treasury had been involved in us setting up the special educational needs review and the manifesto commitment around the independent review of children’s social care. So there was kind of a degree of, I think, understanding about the objectives and the risks within the system.

I think it probably was weaker when you got into things like special schools, you know, more specific issues, and also weaker when you got to departments that we didn’t have such a close pre-existing relationship with. So DCMS, for example.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. That can come down now.

There are two groups that you particularly identify in your statement as groups of children whom you were particularly concerned about.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: And they are the under 1s, so babies?

Ms Indra Morris: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And teenagers?

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Starting with under 1s, you point out in your statement that the risks to this group were well understood in the department from as early as April 2020.

Can we look, please, at INQ000267959.

This is a report published by the NSPCC and it wasn’t published until May 2021, but it’s reporting on the increase in the number of cases of abuse of head trauma between March 2020 and April 2020, I should say specifically 23 March 2020 and 23 April 2020. I’m not sure if you can see those on the page, perhaps on page 2 we see those increases, yes. That is Great Ormond Street reporting that increase in prevalence.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Was that information coming through to you and the Department for Education that early on in the pandemic?

Ms Indra Morris: Not specifically, but we had, as you say, we had identified that this group were a particular risk. We felt they were more hidden than they would ordinarily have been. The national panel, which is the Child Safeguarding Panel, had already started some work which we published during the pandemic about sudden unexpected death of an infant, which is counted separately to that when an infant has been killed or seriously harmed by their parent. So we were very, very worried about this group.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. That can come down.

You say that that information wasn’t coming through to you specifically. Do you mean that Great Ormond Street statistic or generally the information that there was an increase to be worried about?

Ms Indra Morris: I mean that Great Ormond Street –

Counsel Inquiry: I see. So we shouldn’t read into that that there’s any sort of an information gap?

Ms Indra Morris: No, and we were definitely – as you say, I think this was May – was this May 2021?

Counsel Inquiry: This was published May 2021, yes.

Ms Indra Morris: We were – there was connections with the – some of the NHS data and child mortality group, for example, because there was some work in the autumn about raising awareness of seasonal increase – the risk of seasonal increases, particularly around co-sleeping, that sort of thing, and – and we were talking with the NHS about the extent to which that increase came through or not, which it didn’t, in that autumn.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Can we look, please, at paragraph 3.20 of your statement which is on page 19. Thank you very much.

We see here what action was taken by the Vulnerable Children’s Unit about this concern. If we look, please, at the penultimate sentence, I think – or where it starts:

“In addition, the requirement to register births had been suspended in the initial pandemic response and there was a risk that children were therefore not known about.”

An observer might think it was rather obvious that suspending the Registration of Births could lead to safeguarding problems for under 1s, because if their births are not registered, they might not come to be known to GPs or local authorities. They might even fall out of sight of health visiting services.

How was it that this came to be? How was it that this happened without anybody saying, “Stop, you shouldn’t do that, that’s going to create a safeguarding risk”?

Ms Indra Morris: I think it brings us back to the lack of pre-planning. You know, I don’t believe for a moment that anyone thought – sat there and thought: all right, actually this is critical to safeguarding, but we’re going to stop it anyway. I think there just probably wasn’t that thought. I think it was about – they were probably asked the questions, “What are the services that we can pause?”, given the situation we were in in the first lockdown.

Counsel Inquiry: I think it was some months, was it around May 2020 –

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: – that that was reinstated?

Ms Indra Morris: Yes. And of course that created backlog. And it was easier – and that links to your point about health – hospital births were easier to, kind of, track and there was data sharing on that; home births harder. My worry and my question, if we’re thinking about impact on children, is have we – are we still missing some children who were born in that period? And I don’t know whether there’s an answer to that now.

Counsel Inquiry: And just going back to your point about – I think you said, “I don’t think anybody stopped and thought this was a safeguarding risk but we’ll do it anyway”, but that omission to think about the safeguarding implications for children, does that tell us anything about a lack of focus on children in decision making?

Ms Indra Morris: I think it’s – I’d hate to put that on the shoulders on the team who were thinking about birth registrations, specifically. I think, again, it comes back to that wider question about the lack of preparedness and thinking about this through the lens of what children are going to need during a pandemic and what will help us most with safeguarding. The same with health visitors.

Counsel Inquiry: That was going to be my next question.

Ms Indra Morris: Sorry.

Counsel Inquiry: No, not at all, you’ve anticipated it.

The final sentence in this paragraph is:

“The risk was compounded by health visitors not attending as they had been redeployed to COVID-19 response roles.”

I think there are two questions there, which is: again, how were the safeguarding implications of that, which one might think were quite obvious, missed?

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: And secondly, perhaps, as you say, that’s compounding, that’s two safeguarding risks, how could it be that that was missed?

Ms Indra Morris: I think that there are two things going on. One is there was a sense of all hands to the Covid challenge in the health system that was under enormous pressure at that time. And the second is we – it was patchy. I’m not convinced that that redeployment happened everywhere, but we didn’t really know, but we felt that we had to work on the basis that it was a known risk that we should seek to either reverse or prevent in the future. And in fact prevention in the future became the biggest focus.

Counsel Inquiry: That point about all hands to the Covid pump, I think you say part of the answer this is planning, but you also pointed out earlier on in your evidence that we don’t know what sort of pandemic we would be preparing for.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Is there something structural about ensuring that children are not missed in the “all hands to the pandemic pump” moment?

Ms Indra Morris: I think there’s a – there’s quite a tendency in departments, you know, and I’ve been part of that, to have a sector or a sort of service lens on – so, you know, the focus before the pandemic was review of the SEN system or reform of children’s social care. I think we need to find a way of also having the lens that starts with the child, starts with the child and their families, and thinks about what are the needs, what are the drivers of vulnerability and what does that mean in terms of protective public services? Because I think that helps you follow the trail, if you like, through to decisions about which of the services that you need to try to protect, and if you can’t, what the risks are that you need to be prepared to mitigate, or the recovery plan for when things ease.

Counsel Inquiry: And when you say “some way of having a lens”, sorry to press you, but do you have an idea of what that lens would be? Some suggest, for instance, it should be incorporation of the UNCRC. Perhaps there’s some other mechanism. Do you have a sense, based on your work, of what’s needed?

Ms Indra Morris: I think that, in a way, is talking about very important potential protections but actually for me it’s much more about how do you approach understanding the needs of children and young people? Do we really understand yet, even now, the impact of Covid on those – on children and young people? We sort of understand it a bit in elements, but actually, as a kind of thinking about children through different stages in their lives and how they interact with services, what they need, the conditions in which they thrive, it’s very – it’s a different way in to some of the similar questions than saying: how can we strengthen children’s social care, for example? Which is really important because those are protective services for children, some of our most vulnerable children, but I don’t think that – I think, it comes back to the risk that you have a slightly siloed lens.

Sorry, I’m not articulating this very well, but I think, for me, a service lens and a sector lens only gets you so far.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. If we can look, then, at paragraph 3.21 we’ll see what you did to address that situation.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: We read that you had a virtual team established across DfE, Department of Health and Social Care, and the Home Office, to focus on this group – and you’re talking here about babies. You say you also worked with the Chief Nurse at Public Health England –

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: – and that the Chief Nurse was also a member of the Vulnerable Children and Young People National Board. It sounds as though that particular mechanism of bringing together individuals addressed this particular problem; is that right?

Ms Indra Morris: Yes, and I think also it helped that both the Home Office Minister and the Minister for Children and Families were also very alive to this risk early on. And I can’t speak highly enough about the Chief Nurse because sometimes engaging with the health can be complicated and of course this was a particularly difficult time and she really invested time in understanding and almost translating vulnerability into sort of health settings and helping us use her office, if you like, to get the message out that health visitors shouldn’t be deployed coming into the next winter.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. The second group that you highlight in your statement then are teenagers.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: If we can look, please, at paragraph 3.22, we read here a little bit about what the interventions were or what the support was, from:

“We worked closely with the [Home Office] and police and for this reason involved VRUs …”

What are VRUs?

Ms Indra Morris: Sorry, violence reduction units, who are based in local areas.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

And we read that the Home Office and the DfE ministers also wrote to police and Crime Commissioners. I can’t quite tell, Ms Morris, what the interventions were arising from that. What was it that your unit was asking these organisations to do?

Ms Indra Morris: Well, partly we were concerned – we spoke to – very early conversation with the Chief Constable who led on these issues for the National Police Council, and we were worried about teenagers – the risk that teenagers would be criminalised if they adhered to – if they didn’t adhere to social distancing as much, and we were really keen to avoid that.

We were also – in one of the earlier exhibits you showed, where we talked about the narrow measure of vulnerability, there was a “missing” box, and we were also, because they led on that, concerned to get their help with data on “missing”, which was often teenagers and often a sign that there was a safeguarding risk, that could be missing from care, could be missing from children’s homes.

Also there was a question and conversation with DCMS about what, if anything, within their youth remit, they were planning to do or wanted to do, particularly in this group. And also conversation again with the Home Office and the police was what were they seeing in terms of emerging risks, particularly around gangs, county lines, criminal exploitation, where this group was also vulnerable – more vulnerable.

Counsel Inquiry: So is it fair to say, then, this is about gathering information, asking police not to fine or criminalise young people –

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: – for breaching regulations about Covid, and, I think you said, gathering information about children who are missing?

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Is it fair to say that those are, to some extent, quite limited interventions that practically could have prevented teenagers from, for example, online harms and criminal exploitation?

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah. I mean, they were very, very early on. They were almost kind of immediate in the first few weeks. And the assessment was that criminal exploitation and gangs activity had reduced, though the police weren’t complacent about that.

We had a meeting, mine, the national board I chaired, which was cross-department, and also stakeholders, met in – oh, gosh, I think it was July, to have a teen – we had a dedicated item on teenagers. And that invited the Children’s Commissioner to present her work and the Association of Colleges, who lead on further education, to share with us and other stakeholders what was happening and what might help.

But I think I’ve made no secret of the fact that it feels that, you know, we did a certain amount, but I question whether we could have done more.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes.

Ms Indra Morris: But, again, it sort of brings me back to that there is not a strong cohort lens, probably with the exception, perhaps, of care leavers. There wasn’t really a sort of teenage or adolescent agenda going into the pandemic. And we were able to focus on the really high-risk elements of it but I don’t think we really quite galvanised beyond that.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes, you say in your statement at paragraph 3.2 – I beg your pardon, I think it might be 3.26, please. Yes. You say:

“… it is impossible to fully know the extent of risks facing vulnerable children [and] it makes dealing with them more challenging and I do not think we have a full picture to this day.”

You also comment on the challenge you had in securing support for teenagers.

It appears, Ms Morris, that you expressed some disappointment in the extent to which you were able to support teenagers; is that fair?

Ms Indra Morris: Yes. I mean, it’s a difficult one because you can’t always do everything that you want to do, but I felt that this was something that I regretted on a personal level, and I think when you look now – so we touched on the serious incident notifications, or I mention it in my statement, it’s very striking, if we look at the data now, teenagers, you know, are now, kind of, the second highest group. So, for me, there is a sort of – an unmet need that I don’t think we really got to grips with.

Counsel Inquiry: So sorry, the second highest group in what regard?

Ms Indra Morris: Sorry, in respect of the number of serious incident notifications.

Counsel Inquiry: I see.

Ms Indra Morris: The age group has gone up for – the second highest. It’s – under 1s remains the largest.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

The third and final limb of the original work structure, then, that we looked at then, was recovery. And you discuss in your statement mental health provision.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: I entirely appreciate, Ms Morris, that you have now left the Civil Service so you may be unable to comment on this, and please do say so if that’s the case.

Do you have an opinion as to what extent there is an enduring impact that perhaps recovery measures haven’t been able to address?

Ms Indra Morris: I mean, the sort of publicly available evidence suggests that there is, but that – but, again, the work on it has been quite fragmented, and I thought, actually, the expert report that you had to the Inquiry probably knitted it together better than most things, but that might also be that I haven’t been sort of following this closely.

I think the question we haven’t answered, and that’s – applies to mental health but also more broadly, is, you know, is this a Covid generation or is this now something that is, if you like, kind of embedded and part of kind of – and I think that’s quite important for thinking about what the response is, and also, you know, serious incident notifications. I know these are a small number, but they’re the most acute.

Again, it’s striking that suicide has gone up as a cause of death, if you look at the current data for 23/24, and the increase in deprivation of liberty orders as well, again which was a problem and a challenge going up.

So there is a sense for me that there is a problem at the most acute end that provision is not set up, whether that’s in the NHS or in the care system, to support.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you very much, Ms Morris.

I want to come to now ask you about your overall reflections for the future, and you have kindly answered some of those questions as we have gone along, but if I can ask you, please, to look at paragraph 6.3 of your statement at page 27. You say here that:

“[We need to] Put the child and young person at the heart of planning, delivery and learning. There should be a proper focus on allowing the voices of children and young people themselves to be heard, and to inform any measures taken.”

And I want, if I may, Ms Morris, just to press you slightly on that again.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: In terms of concrete mechanisms that one could put in place by way of pandemic planning, do you have a view on that, how that could be achieved?

Ms Indra Morris: I mean, I think from an SRO perspective I could have set up, I could have, say, worked with the National Children’s Bureau early on and said, let’s set up a children and young people’s board, you know, they have experience of running those kind of things, to help inform us and have that voice more directly, not just mis-filtered, if you like, or advocated through the charities.

I – the fact that we couldn’t even get a pre-return-to-school press conference in September, if I’m honest, it makes me quite cross. But I, you know, but I still think, you know, actually, could we have done a bit more, and that couldn’t – it wouldn’t have necessarily needed to go through the Cabinet Office sort of decision making? Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. Another point I wanted to ask you about is at paragraph 6.7 over at page 28.

Ms Indra Morris: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Here you say we need to “guard against optimism bias.”

You say:

“I think we were overly optimistic about how quickly the pandemic would end, and normality … return …”?

Ms Indra Morris: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: How might we guard against optimism bias in the future?

Ms Indra Morris: I mean, there is something about planning, you know, your scenarios, work on a number of different levels, wouldn’t they, including duration. But I think it’s also about just thinking about creating the space to call it out and check ourselves against it. And I think we did later on, I think we got better at that, but I think in those early weeks and couple of months, there was a sort of – maybe it was a bit of a hope, that, you know, it really would be 12 weeks, you know, hard focus and then we’d be through it. But I think there’s a – over-optimism is a sort of factor that we’ve seen in a number of different kind of – play out in a number of different forums, I think.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you, Ms Morris. Those are the questions I have about your recommendations. Is there anything you want to add to them?

Ms Indra Morris: I mean, I think …

Lady Hallett: Take your time. Try having a sip of water.

Ms Indra Morris: Thank you, that’s very good advice.

I think my gratitude to everyone.

Ms Cayoun: Thank you, Ms Morris.

Questions From the Chair

Lady Hallett: Ms Morris, can I go back to – you said you couldn’t get a pre-return-to-school press conference. Who blocked that? Was that the Education department, Downing Street, Cabinet Office?

Ms Indra Morris: Well, I talked to my – the DfE comms lead who felt that they’d got an agreement – we’d got an agreement from Number 10 but it didn’t happen, so – but it was a definite – it was an ask of them. And this was also coming from the Children’s Commissioners who said it would have been great to have a Downing Street press conference, let’s get the message out to children yeah.

Lady Hallett: But no explanation as to why it –

Ms Indra Morris: No, no.

Lady Hallett: Ms Morris, thank you very much indeed for coming to help the Inquiry. You’ve been extraordinarily frank and really helpful and I’m very grateful to you. I appreciate it’s not easy and I could see at the end, you know, it takes you over and I know it’s not easy to go back over those very difficult times. So thank you for all you tried to do and thank you for your honesty and thank you for helping us.

The Witness: Thank you.

Ms Cayoun: Thank you.

My Lady, the next witness is Professor Sam Baron.

Lady Hallett: Thank you.

Professor Samantha Baron

PROFESSOR SAMANTHA BARON (affirmed).

Lady Hallett: I hope we haven’t kept you waiting for too long, Professor Baron.

The Witness: No, that’s fine. Thank you.

Ms Cayoun: My Lady, I should say at the outset that this evidence session may be distressing and that it will refer to children who died as a result of neglect and abuse during the pandemic.

Lady Hallett: Thank you.

Questions From Counsel to the Inquiry

Ms Cayoun: Professor Baron, I think you have a witness statement for the Inquiry, and I think you have it in front of you, and our reference for it is INQ000588188.

You signed that witness statement on 24 September 2005. Can you confirm that its contents are true to the best of your knowledge and belief.

Professor Samantha Baron: I can, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

And Professor Baron, you are giving evidence today in your capacity as the interim chief executive officer of the British Association of Social Workers, or BASW as we will call it.

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And you on that role fairly recently, on 15 September; is that right?

Professor Samantha Baron: I did, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. Your predecessor in that role was Dr Ruth Allen and she also provided a witness statement for this module on behalf of BASW, and it was dated 21 July 2025. I understand that you have had the opportunity to read that witness statement carefully and that on behalf of BASW you agree with its contents and wish to adopt it as your own evidence; is that right?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes, that’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. And for the transcript, the reference for that statement is INQ000650824.

That is the statement that we will mainly be referring to during the course of your statement, and for ease I’ll refer to it as “BASW statement”.

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Professor Baron, Dr Allen had previously given evidence to this Inquiry about adult social care, in the context of an earlier module, and that evidence included something of an introduction to the role of BASW, so don’t need to ask you to tell us about that. But in terms of children and family social workers, I understand that at the time of the pandemic, of BASW’s 22,000 members it was estimated that about 60% of those worked in children and family services; is that right?

Professor Samantha Baron: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. And in terms of geographical reach, BASW represents social workers across the whole of the UK; is that right?

Professor Samantha Baron: We do.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. And whilst social care is a devolved competence, is it right that there’s a degree of commonality in the statutory duties of social workers who work with children and families across the United Kingdom?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes, that’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

And a point made in BASW’s statement is that the social workers that BASW represents deliver their statutory responsibilities thorough a range of roles, and that whilst many are employed by local authorities, others might be employed by different agencies, such as foster care agencies, or different public services, like the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service; is that right?

Professor Samantha Baron: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Professor, we have heard evidence already in these hearings about the fact that one of the consequences of school closures and of lockdown was that many children were living with a heightened degree of risk and harm and facing greater adversity in their own homes. Would you agree with that even?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. We have heard, however, that during the first part of lockdown in spring 2020 there was a significant decrease in the number of referrals to children’s services, and I think you’ll have seen evidence of that across the UK. So, for example, the Northern Ireland Department of Health has told the Inquiry that the average number of child protection referrals in the first three weeks of April was 34% lower than in 2019. There is evidence that in Wales, the Welsh Government reported reduced referrals and the Department for Education has provided evidence that referrals were 16% lower. And we know that similarly in Scotland there were trends of lower referrals, including to CAMHS.

From BASW’s perspective, was concern about the fact that heightened risk to children was seemingly not reflected in rates of referrals a concern across the UK?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes, it was definitely a concern across the UK, and our members were reporting, ahead of any statistical monitoring, that actually we were concerned about referral rates declining, that actually the numbers that were coming through the partner agencies who would normally refer into social services weren’t referring into social services, and we also knew from our members that there’d be a level of unmet need, particularly around children and families who had previously –

Counsel Inquiry: I’m just going to ask you, Professor, to slow down. I’m sorry to interrupt you.

Professor Samantha Baron: Sorry.

Counsel Inquiry: Please carry on. You were saying unmet need?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes. Our members were reporting that they also had concerns around unmet need. And unmet need refers to those children and families who’d previously never had any contact with social services. We knew that actually the pandemic would have – would affect pre-existing issues for families and children. So there was a level of concern that really, initially, wasn’t being picked up.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

And one of the key points, I think, that BASW makes clear in its witness statement is that for social workers, they needed, on the one hand, to continue to fulfil their legal duties and obligations, and what they felt were their ethical obligations, with, on the other hand, wanting to stay safe and avoid spreading the virus or becoming ill themselves. And taking just a practical example, a social worker whose daily work might involve visiting four different families might be worried about spreading the virus by going home to home, but also the interests of the children who they were planning to visit in doing so if they weren’t going to go to the home.

Is that right? Was that sort of the central tension for social workers?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes, it was an initial tension around the absence of PPE for social workers and how they undertake home visits. So there was no clear guidance and no understanding of how social workers predominantly, in children’s services, work in family homes and what impact that would have. There was much more focus on health.

BASW actually did six representations across government asking for more direct guidance around the use of PPE, and to my knowledge since coming into post, we never received a reply to that.

We were, instead, dependent on public health guidance, which was directed to health professionals working in community settings.

Counsel Inquiry: Just pausing there, so we understand, what specifically was missing from public health guidance directed to social workers in community settings? What was the difficulty in interpreting and applying that for going to visit children in their homes?

Professor Samantha Baron: Oh, right. So the first thing was about the level of PPE and the absence of PPE for social workers. We were definitely not a priority area.

The second one was about transmission of the virus and actually having the right PPE in between home visits, and how that would affect the social worker, the parents and children.

Counsel Inquiry: I see. And in fact BASW produced its own guidance about these issues, didn’t it?

Professor Samantha Baron: It did, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And I think BASW also produced guidance about how a social worker should decide whether or not it was safe to carry out a home visit; is that right?

Professor Samantha Baron: It did, yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: And Professor Baron, that judgement of knowing whether or not to make a home visit, of knowing whether or not to enter a home, that must be a particularly difficult judgment for an individual social worker, is it?

Professor Samantha Baron: It is. It’s an enormously complex thing without a pandemic. If you then place the restrictions of the pandemic on, about the restrictions around visiting, being in close proximity and social distancing, that became even more complex.

There is, in some of the evidence submitted by Professor Harry Ferguson, a really good example of some of the tensions and the ethical considerations a social worker has to consider, and it involves a social worker going out on a home visit, only being allowed to do a doorstep visit, with a parent alleging that they had coronavirus, and therefore would not be able to go into the family home, whilst also seeing a very small child under the age of five at the top of the stairs with a black eye. Now –

Counsel Inquiry: Again, I’m just going to ask you to slow down, thank you, Professor.

Professor Samantha Baron: Sorry.

Counsel Inquiry: Not at all.

Professor Samantha Baron: So that situation itself would demand social care skills in terms of being able to assess information very quickly, maintain some kind of rapport with the adult, understand whether actually the adult did have coronavirus and was it appropriate to seek medical confirmation of that, whilst also engaging with a child, who was some distance away. Which actually the social worker managed to do very effectively, and actually the child came to the door, so the social worker could do a more accurate assessment.

But in that moment, the social worker, not only in terms of deploying their own skills to engage and gather information, would have been balancing coronavirus restrictions and not to go into the house, actually with his or her statutory requirements around the protection and the assessment of risk for that child, in addition to balancing the social worker’s own needs around transmission and the potential to get coronavirus.

Counsel Inquiry: And in that moment, and in all of those difficult things that the social worker has in their mind, is it the case that a very good piece of guidance could have helped that social worker, or is there a reality that that is such a difficult judgment that it would be very difficult to produce a piece of guidance that could guide somebody through that situation?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yeah, I think it is complex. But the difficulty is, you were responding to guidance and legislation. So I think for a future pandemic, that would be the issue that you’d want to balance, really, and have a clearer direction, because guidance is guidance, but you have a statutory responsibility.

If there’d have been better measures put in place to support the social worker in that, actually the social worker may have actually wanted to go into the house to actually then do an assessment with the child and with the family, to be a bit more accurate.

I think the other bit about guidance would be just to reinforce the multidisciplinary nature of the assessment of children and families, because that was very absent. So in that moment the social worker was also left with that information on their own.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. That example is very clear and very helpful, and in your statement you set out a number of ways that the child protection system came under pressure as a result of the pandemic. And you describe, just as you have a moment ago, just how some of those pressures created system-wide problems that impacted on children. And I want to explore with you how some of those problems manifested in practice on the ground.

We are able to gain some insight into that through the Safeguarding Practice Review that was conducted following the death of Finley Boden. Before I ask you questions about this, I should stress that this Inquiry is considering the systemic impact of the pandemic and that it is not this Inquiry’s function to consider the circumstances of an individual death, but that these questions are asked to help us have a better understanding of the practical reality and the gravity of the points that you make in your statement about those systemic issues.

When the pandemic arrived in early March 2020, Finley Boden was a newborn who was in the legal care of a local authority, and his case was being considered by the family courts as part of care proceedings. And the question for the social workers and the courts was whether this baby should live with his parents, who were known to have histories of substance abuse and domestic violence in previous relationships, and to have been unable to cope with caring for this child’s older sibling.

The Safeguarding Practice Review into the circumstances of his death later found that as a result of this legal status, this child should have been one of the most protected children because social services were working so intensely with him and his family. The pandemic, however, had brought additional challenges that the child protection system perhaps hadn’t faced before, and I want to talk through some of those with you, please.

First of all, although this child’s family were going through court proceedings, which meant that an experienced social worker was appointed to be his independent guardian, and to represent his interests, and that guardian, together with lawyers and magistrates, were involved in reviewing his safety, because of the pandemic, those court proceedings became remote and in this case they were largely conducted by telephone.

The Safeguarding Practice Review found that that inhibited some of the discussions between those professionals that would normally happen at court, and that led to some confusion during those proceedings. For example, the child’s guardian thought that there had been an order for drug testing of the parents before they could take their baby home, whereas in fact there hadn’t been such an order. And in BASW’s statement, Professor Baron, BASW point out that the vast majority of care cases became remote hearings rather than in-person hearings during the pandemic, and that that sometimes did lead to confusion and delay; is that right?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes, that is correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Is that something that BASW’s social workers were worried about?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes, they were worried about that. Just before I comment on that a bit further, if I can just express some condolences about the death of the child, but also some sincere thanks, actually, to the grandparents who stepped in to look after and protect this child and his sister.

Sorry, could you repeat that question again.

Counsel Inquiry: Was the move from in-person court hearings to remote hearings something that BASW’s social workers were worried about?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yeah, they were worried about that largely because when you’re in person what you’re actually doing in those situations, is gathering information and trying to piece together a very high-risk jigsaw and you do that as part of a multi-professional team and that is then relayed through a court process. When you’re actually online, it restricts that. It restricts the sharing of information because, of course, online conversations become much more task-oriented rather than exploratory and that was definitely a contributory factor in this.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. Returning to this case, there was a period when the child’s local authority social worker was on leave for six weeks because of illness, during which no visits were conducted to the child, and no child-in-need meetings were held. The local authority in question partly attributed this to the unique pressures of the pandemic, but in fact, in BASW’s statement, you have highlighted the issue of reduced workforce and spikes in staff sickness as something that inevitably impacted the capacity to safeguard and support the child despite the best efforts of many practitioners.

Is it your view, then, that this was probably quite a widespread problem during the pandemic?

Professor Samantha Baron: What was a widespread problem?

Counsel Inquiry: Staff illness, staff shortages leading to children not being seen?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes, I mean, to some degree, which is an awful term to use in this context. It was a perfect storm, which was a long time in the making which is around workforce pressures for children – people working in children and families. So what you had in this particular instance was you had three social workers, which is unusual in itself, the social worker who knew the family the best actually went off on a period of sick leave, we don’t know if that was coronavirus linked or not. We then had an NQSW, a newly qualified social worker who was working on the case. That would be somebody who was in their first year of practice. To be in your first year of practice with such a complex case when you are becoming a new practitioner and meeting your colleagues online, so you do not have opportunities for the professional socialisation process that you’d normally get by being in an office contributed quite significantly.

The other social worker was an agency social worker and, again, that reflects the use of agency social workers, because of retention issues around children and families. Agency workers largely are very experienced social workers, but they’re coming in to a new local authority and a new employer, a new context, and if I’m right in how I’ve read the case, actually it was the agency social who didn’t have experience in working with children and families.

Counsel Inquiry: And those are the details of this case, but does that tell us something about how complex staff shortages can become when the staff in question are highly specialist children’s social workers?

Professor Samantha Baron: Absolutely, yes. It tells you that. It also really gives a recommendation towards having child protection as named workers so that you don’t have as many workers, so you can keep that consistency of information and assessment.

Counsel Inquiry: We also know that, from the safeguarding review, that one of the new social workers who stepped in went on to produce what the report called an over-optimistic assessment of these parents’ ability to care for their child, and that because of the pandemic, that social worker’s observations of the dynamic between the child and his parents had been based on outdoor contact sessions.

Would you agree that, again at a systemic level, requirements for social distancing and different ways of practice might have resulted in assessments – well, might have resulted in social workers’ ability to observe normal interactions being impaired?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes, they were significantly impaired, because actually an assessment of children and family actually predominantly takes place within the place where children live, and there you’re able to observe the relationships with adults who live in the home, the material conditions of the home, whether there’s extreme levels of poverty. So to undertake a visit from a doorstep or, in fact, on occasion in a garden actually limits your understanding to bring that information together. But also, at that point, so did multidisciplinary working. So, you know, on that – that social worker that you’ve quoted, you know, it appears that she or he took substantial information from what was being presented to her from the parents.

Now, what we know, we would normally gather information from schools, teachers, health visitors, who were all actually not working in the way that – (overspeaking) –

Counsel Inquiry: And pausing there, because you’re right to pick up that point, we also know from the review that this child’s father had recently been released from prison which meant that probation services should have been regularly monitoring him, but because of the pandemic, probation offices were closed and his remaining monitoring sessions took place by telephone. Similarly, that the father was known to have used a range of class A, B and C drugs in the past, but that the substance abuse services he was engaging with also switched from in-person to remote services and he was relied upon to self-report his drug use.

Is that an example of the multi-agency or perhaps multi-services system not functioning as it usually would?

Professor Samantha Baron: It’s completely a very good example. I think also in the example in the case report, there was actually housing identified, as well, and they would be quite a key partner.

Counsel Inquiry: And we also know from this review that when the child was placed back in his family’s care there were three occasions on which he could have been seen in the home. On one occasion, in the later months of 2020, so during the second national lockdown, a health visitor who had identified this family as high priority and thus meriting an in-person visit, wasn’t able to see the child because the child’s mother said that he was having a Covid test and soon thereafter the social worker who was supposed to carry out an unannounced visit wasn’t able to do so again because the child’s mother said that he had Covid and it had never been confirmed whether or not there had been a test and that the test had been positive.

And not long thereafter, the police also attended the home, but it isn’t clear from the report whether the police entered the home, and it is clear that they didn’t know to check on the children. And this meant, didn’t it, that in the weeks prior to this child’s death he wasn’t seen by any of the professionals who in ordinary times would have been inside his home, and I think this problem of professionals not being able to get into homes in lockdown and even, as you say, being faced by families who say or use Covid as an excuse, is one that BASW was worried about at the time; is that right?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes, that’s correct. I think also, it was also about, actually, can we request medical evidence of that somebody has Covid? And that was something, a debate, amongst our members about whether it would be ethical to do that.

Counsel Inquiry: Why was that a matter for debate?

Professor Samantha Baron: Well, it was a debate in the sense that, you know, if we’ve got some issues around disguised compliance, we are concerned about the risks, and parents are adults who are using Covid as an excuse to actually not allow participation. Would it have been right then to seek a medical diagnosis of that?

Counsel Inquiry: Were you aware of any guidance on that issue?

Professor Samantha Baron: There was no guidance.

Counsel Inquiry: Can we look, please, at INQ000588022.

This is the record of the Every Story Matters project for this module, and we see here a quote from a social worker in Northern Ireland also expressing this concern.

Do you have any sense, Professor – and please say if you don’t – of how widespread an issue this was?

Professor Samantha Baron: I think around children and families, where they were working with children at risk, in the child protection, that would have been a very high priority.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Two other points in respect of the Safeguarding Practice Review into the death of Finley Boden. We also know that there should have been extensive discussion about all of these circumstances between junior social workers who were handling the case and as you’ve said, who may have been new to the case, or to the local authority, and their supervisors. But of course, because of the pandemic, that usual pattern of discussion and supervision was interrupted by the fact that everybody was working from home.

Is that something that BASW was worried about at the time?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes, definitely. Our members were definitely reporting that in terms of getting supervision, because supervision around practice happens in two different ways: it will happen informally and formally. And informally is literally when you are in the office and you will seek the advice and guidance of somebody more experienced, whether that’s a social worker or your line manager. We also know, because of the increased workload and the move towards home working and having to actually introduce computers, data protection, to that, that actually supervision was less frequent for many. And obviously in this case, actually you had some inexperienced social workers who were newly qualified where supervision would be required to happen so many times a month.

Counsel Inquiry: And why is supervision so important for social workers?

Professor Samantha Baron: Well, supervision is a way of supporting and making sure the right decisions are made around children at risk. It’s a way of exploring information so that we can be – jointly share that decision. It’s a way of developing professionals to understand the information and where their professional legal responsibilities sit.

Counsel Inquiry: And another difference in practice at the time in this case is that there should have been child protection conferences or child in need meetings regularly where professionals would discuss the case with each other, but also on occasions with the child’s parents. But because of the pandemic, those meetings became remote and the parents joined either by telephone or not at all. And it isn’t always – we read from the safeguarding review that it wasn’t always clear whether the parents or the family had been seen.

Would it be fair to say that this issue, of reduced opportunity to speak to families in person, was also widespread during the pandemic?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes. And it very significantly affects your ability to collate information.

I think we’ve used in our submission the word “curation”, and that actually if you’re doing something online then parents who harm children can curate.

Now, people curate for lots of different reasons: they curate information through shame, through guilt, through protection, not wanting to reveal somebody is in the home. But they will also curate to defend against some of the actions that they have had done against children.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

And we know, Professor, that, very sadly, this little boy died, aged ten months old, on Christmas Day of 2020. And we won’t go into the detail of how he died, but the judge who sentenced his parents for his murder said that he had suffered from unimaginable cruelty.

And if we can please look now at one of the conclusions of the Safeguarding Practice Review at INQ000581928 – thank you – paragraph 2.41.

We see that one of the conclusions was that:

“At what was a crucial point in planning for the children ‘the myriad protective systems and services designed to detect, prevent and respond to maltreatment’ were severely disrupted. As a consequence, as face-to-face contact with families reduced or assessed, professional’s dependence on parents’ ‘self-reporting’ correspondingly increased.”

Taking a step back, then, Professor, from a social work perspective, do you consider that this tells us something important perhaps, about how our child protection systems were undermined during the pandemic?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes, I think it does tell you how they were undermined, and because we were relying on self-reporting, often – and obviously, in this case, to the exclusion of other professionals having access to provide that wider information. But usually, outside of pandemics, that multi-professional system works very well. And it works well to actually provide lots of information, often which can be competing information, which we would then have to balance and consider risks and then decide what we would need to do to protect a child.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. That can come down now.

Now, that is, of course, one safeguarding review, but we know that local child safeguarding practice reviews are reviewed annually by the Child Safeguarding Review Panel. And I think you have had a chance to consider the annual review that was published in 2021 about the reviews that were collected in 2020.

We don’t need to go there, but I think you will have seen that the reported number of serious incident notifications were 27% higher for 2020 than they had been for 2019, and those are reports of serious injuries or deaths for children who had been looked after.

At first blush, that might appear to tell us that the pandemic was causing a very significant increase in the numbers of children known to local authorities who were being significantly harmed. Would that be a correct conclusion?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes, that would be a correct conclusion. And I don’t think BASW submitted evidence specific to serious incidents, and the data around that, but what we did say in our evidence was actually that we were very confident that those pre-existing factors would increase with referrals and then also increase serious incidents.

Counsel Inquiry: So is it your view, then, that that was a predictable increase?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: We’ve also heard evidence from a director of children’s services that, in her view, it was becoming clear late on in the pandemic that the caseloads that her department were working with had increased in complexity. And I think you will also have seen Department for Education evidence from 2022 that several local authorities were saying the same thing.

Is that an experience that BASW members had as well?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes, completely. You know, we were aware, as social workers, that if we were moving into a position in the pandemic where people – the restrictions on people’s movement and restrictions on what people could do, it would also meant that there were additional pressures in the home, and those pressures would be resulting from poverty, they’d be resulting from people not being in employment. It would also be if there were any pre-existing issues, for example mental health, any substance use addiction, any domestic violence, that that would increase significantly.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you, Professor Baron. I’m going to come now to ask you about some of the changes that were made across the UK through regulations and guidance.

And we know that a suite of regulations were made as part of the earliest responses to the pandemic in the child protection sector, and I know that BASW was critical of many of those changes.

Before I ask you about those though, I want to ask you, just reflecting on the discussion we’ve just had about one case, whether there was anything – any changes that weren’t made to practice that you thought perhaps ought to have been, or any guidance that wasn’t forthcoming that perhaps ought to have been?

So, for example, we talked about supervision, and about how that moved to be online or became less frequent. Is that the sort of thing that there ought to have been some guidance or thinking about?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes, I mean, I think that’s a good example of what we could have thought about. I think there should have been more attention paid to home visits. You know, you can’t escape the fact that you need to do an assessment of a child’s environment, and I think further guidance around how we undertake home visits – and to have used BASW to actually explore that and work that through, in terms of what we could have done in a different way.

So when you compare it to health, actually, you know, significant changes were made across the health system to promote people still getting a health service, but actually it was restrictions in social work and social care. So there was a complete undermining, really, of the public welfare system that protects children and families in that situation.

So I think it could have done that.

The easements that they brought in, I think the profession was shocked that actually they were brought in, quite surprised by the extent of them. That here we were in a pandemic and actually the removal of the child’s rights, which in essence what the easements represented, creates considerable difficulties for children, families and for social workers.

Counsel Inquiry: Just thinking back to the comment you made about more attention needing to be paid to home visits, you have commented already that there ought to have been more PPE and perhaps sufficient PPE for a change between visiting different homes. Other than that, is there anything that could have helped to decide when and how to conduct home visits?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yeah, I think there could have been exploration about whether you could have visited more than one person with another professional, what that visit looked like. I think you could have asked families to actually meet in other places, and actually you observe families working together and working with children, so you can observe that. So I think there are two different things you could have done in that respect, and to have explored that a bit further.

Counsel Inquiry: So more creativity?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Different options?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Coming, then, to the regulations themselves, we know from the witness statement of the Trades Union Congress that Unison campaigned for the Adoption and Children (Coronavirus) (Amendment) Regulations to be scrapped. And one of the issues they raised is that there had been no consultation with social workers.

Professor Samantha Baron: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Was that your experience as well?

Professor Samantha Baron: That is correct, yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: And BASW’s witness statement explains that the reason that BASW was opposed to the easements in the Care Act – I beg your pardon, BASW’s witness statement explains the reasons for your opposition to the easements, as they were called, in the Care Act, and the regulations.

And if we can look, please, at paragraph 125 of the BASW witness statement – that’s page 28 – we see that:

“A particular concern related to the use of the phrase ‘as soon as is reasonably practicable’ in relation to conducting reviews of care arrangements.”

Why was that a particular concern?

Professor Samantha Baron: Because it removes a timed right for a child. So how this is phrased is that, you know, children who are looked after by the local authority, there was an inherent assumption in those – in the guidance that, actually, because children were looked after, they therefore were in a safe, protected place, and therefore you could ease their legal rights to have a timed assessment, when actually a social worker would do that quite the opposite way round, which is a child that has been removed is significantly at risk and has faced considerable risk, and therefore the need for timed assessment. And the timed – timing of an assessment and the timeliness of a review is to protect the child. Children have the right to grow, they have the right to develop, they have the right to maintain contact with their families, and actually without that assessment, you can’t then enable those functions to happen.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. As part of these regulations, also, local authorities were permitted to have social workers visiting children living in institutional settings –

Professor Samantha Baron: That’s right.

Counsel Inquiry: – less frequently than they are ordinarily required to and that those visits were permitted to be undertaken remotely. Can you explain, please, what the particular limitations of remote visits in institutional settings would be?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yeah, well, again, it’s about the child’s rights to have an assessment, actually, and, you know, we would hope that children that are looked after are there for a period of time and that actually they can move forward in their lives. If you don’t have an assessment of the child, whether they’re at home, whether they’re in with foster carers, whether they’re in an institutionalised setting, you don’t allow that progress of that child. And that will be, for example, children leaving care, so children might be leaving an institutionalised care setting and moving into semi-independent. If you suspend or defer an assessment in a review period, then that process will not happen which ultimately can create terrible anxiety and increased trauma for that child.

Counsel Inquiry: It may be said, Professor Baron, that maintaining the frequency of visits to children in these range of settings was or would have been overly burdensome for local authorities and social workers, and that it was necessary for there to be a reduction. What would you say to that?

Professor Samantha Baron: I think I’d go back to the earlier point that children who are looked after, children are actually more high risk with high-level needs, and actually, to suspend their right to protect their needs is quite a serious position to be in.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. Can we look also at another change, which was the ability or the provision for some children who were in care to have their contact with their birth families take place remotely rather than in person.

Can we look, please, at paragraph 142 of your witness statement, which is at page 32.

Thank you.

We read there that BASW was concerned about this being a consequence of delays in court proceedings, and at 143, we read an example of one social worker explaining that they had a child aged 3 who said to them “Mummy lives in a computer now” because she saw her mum only through virtual contact.

That is a very sad thing to read –

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes, it is.

Counsel Inquiry: – and contemplate, Professor. But again, thinking through what might be a difficult balance, it’s right to say, isn’t it, that for many children who are in care, the contact that they have with their parents is supervised for that child’s safety, and that supervision is often facilitated by paid professionals at a dedicated venue, so that’s lots of people coming into contact potentially in a confined space. It may be said that it was understandable, in those circumstances, or necessary, to reduce transmission of the virus, to move that contact online.

Again, that’s a difficult balance. Where do you say that balance lies, Professor?

Professor Samantha Baron: That’s a difficult question to know where that balance sits. The most important thing is how we maintain contact with birth families, actually, and in this case obviously the little boy was 3 years of age. So it’s about a relationships with primary care givers and what that means to a child’s emotional and physical development, and that was severely hampered through going online, combined with court delays, actually you hamper that relationship.

Now, what we don’t know in this situation was what the court outcome would be, and actually, children who have gone through court proceedings have varying levels of contact with their families and it’s dependent on the child, it depends on the families and where they are, but also the age of the child, and actually, the primary thing here is about the child’s emotional development, and actually to have delays and restrictions, that then actually seriously affects that relationship.

Counsel Inquiry: So would it be your position, Professor, that the child’s emotional need and the child’s right to see their parent in person should have taken priority over the risk of transmission of the virus?

Professor Samantha Baron: I think mitigation could have been put in place around transmission of the virus.

Counsel Inquiry: What sort of mitigation?

Professor Samantha Baron: Well, testing.

Counsel Inquiry: Testing?

Professor Samantha Baron: We could quite simply have found out if those people were tested rather than to have a blanket approach, which is to go online.

Counsel Inquiry: So let me understand your position, then. It would be that there should have been greater focus on whether it was possible in an individual case –

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – to use things such as testing –

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – rather than have the general rule that all contact was –

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – moved online?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: One more difficult question about balance, please, if I may.

Professor Samantha Baron: Okay.

Counsel Inquiry: We know that another change in the delivery of children’s social care is that some of the support services that social services usually provide became more scarce. And we know that, for instance, the availability of short break or respite services significantly reduced. I don’t think I need to take you there, but the Local Government Association survey for this Inquiry showed that 55% of English local authorities and 68% of Welsh local authorities decreased the availability of short break or respite services.

Are those the services that usually enable people for caring – sorry. Those are services that usually enable people who are caring for children with very challenging needs to share some of that care and essentially to have a break. Again, that is a situation that requires people to move around from home to home, and therefore may well have risked transmission of the virus. On the other hand, withdrawing those services could be very difficult indeed for those children and their carers.

Where does the balance lie in that respect?

Professor Samantha Baron: Where’s does the balance lie? The balance lies in the protection of the child, really, and – because the protection of the child is primacy. So how do we then become creative or innovative, particularly through the use of testing, to make sure that those services are maintained to some degree for children that we know would be at exceptionally high risk.

Counsel Inquiry: I think there was a time, Professor, during the pandemic when testing wasn’t widely available. Would it be your view that, in circumstances like that, actually sometimes we do have to curb, for want of a better word, the child’s right to respite or contact, for example? Or is it your view that the child’s rights should take primacy over those concerns?

Professor Samantha Baron: I think I mentioned child’s rights in relation to risk. So I think some of the guidance that we were offering was around how we make that assessment of risk, and that assessment of risk also includes transmission of a virus. So how do we balance that? There was very little conversation in any guidance that was produced around how you balance that risk, and in fact, some of the submissions that we put through to the Scottish Parliament through the Scottish Association of Social Workers actually made that very point: actually, there should be more attention paid to balancing of risks on an individual basis.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you very much, Professor.

Looking at your, or BASW’s reflections and recommendations for the future, can we look, please, at paragraph 178 of your witness statement, which is at page 40. And looking at these, in fact much of what you have said about PPE and the focus on the implications for home visits of a lack of PPE is prominent among your recommendations and similarly at 178(g), the guidance that you suggest should have been considered on moving between homes.

In terms of planning for a pandemic, we see at 178(e) your suggestion that emergency planning for future pandemics and other national crises should prioritise children’s services and recognise the unique statutory responsibilities of the social work profession.

Can you help, Professor Baron, with any specific aspects of pandemic planning that you say would prioritise children’s services?

Professor Samantha Baron: Yeah, I think the first thing I would recommend is that, actually, social work as a profession is recognised as being central to any pandemic planning measures that are put in place. It was quite clear that social work wasn’t present, there was a lack of understanding about how social work works and how social work is organised. There was consistently mixed messages between social work and social care and obviously one of the differences is around statutory responsibilities between social work and social care, and I think at the most, highest point of pandemic planning we need to put social work at the forefront of that. That’s then about balancing children’s rights, the rights of families within that situation, and obviously the same point was also made in the adults module.

Counsel Inquiry: And what would it look like to prioritise social care in pandemic planning? Would that be in terms of consultation, guidance that differentiated?

Professor Samantha Baron: Do you mean social work or social care?

Counsel Inquiry: Social work.

Professor Samantha Baron: Yeah, sorry. No, it’s actually about having social workers available at minister level. We have senior civil servant social workers across the whole four nations, actually strengthening their position in government, so that actually they can give guidance, and they actually form part of the emergency planning systems.

In a previous role I had in a local authority as the – one of the directors for social work, I was very central to emergency planning at a local authority level, and I think that model should be adopted across national government.

Ms Cayoun: Very helpful. Thank you, Professor.

My Lady, those are all my questions. Do you have

any questions?

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed, Professor. I’m

really grateful to you for your help and obviously

grateful to all your colleagues for the excellent work

they tried to do.

The Witness: Thank you.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed.

The Witness: Can I just pay tribute, actually, and a huge thank you to all those social workers who have worked tirelessly and are very committed to children and families, and continue to do so.

Lady Hallett: Thank you.

Very well, I shall return at 2.15.

(1.10 pm)

(The Short Adjournment)

(2.13 pm)

Lady Hallett: Ms Dobbin.

Ms Dobbin: My Lady, may I please call Ms Vicky Ford.

Mrs Vicky Ford

MRS VICKY FORD (sworn).

Lady Hallett: Sorry to keep you waiting, Ms Ford.

Questions From Lead Counsel to the Inquiry for Module 8

Ms Dobbin: Ms Ford, can I ask you –

Mrs Vicky Ford: It’s Mrs, sorry. Mrs Ford.

Lead 8: Sorry. Mrs Ford, can I ask you to give your full name to the Inquiry, please?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Victoria Grace Ford.

Lead 8: Mrs Ford, you ought to have a statement in front of you that bears the number INQ000587997. Have you got that in front of you?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Sorry?

Lead 8: You ought to have a witness statement in front of you.

Mrs Vicky Ford: My witness statement?

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah, yeah, I’ve got that, thank you.

Lead 8: Are you content that that witness statement is true to the best of your knowledge and belief?

Mrs Vicky Ford: It is. I would, though, say it’s not the best bit of work I’ve ever done. I was recovering from cancer treatment at the time I completed this so on re-reading it, it’s all true, but there’s some things I might have wanted to caveat or nuance a bit more, so maybe if we get into that we’ll do that.

Lady Hallett: Certainly. And, well, thank you for taking the time to do it when you were obviously going through a rough phase.

The Witness: Thank you.

Ms Dobbin: Mrs Ford, I hope I can start with some things that are not controversial, and easy. I think it’s right that you served as the Parliamentary

Under-Secretary of State in the Department for Education

from February 2020 to September 2021; is that right?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: And that was your first ministerial post, I think.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: And specifically, you were appointed on 17 February –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: – of that year, and you were the Parliamentary

Under-Secretary of State for Children and Families –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: – correct? And your responsibilities included, there’s quite a long list –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: – so I’m not going to say everything but just to cover some of the things that might be of most interest to us, you had responsibility for children’s social care encompassing oversight of the system –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: – funding and workforce, and that included child protection and children in care too –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: – is that correct? You also had responsibility for special educational needs as well –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: – including the funding of that sector?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: You had responsibility for early years provision.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: And that included early years education, as well –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: – I understand? You had responsibility for alternative provision –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: – as well. You had a responsibility for disadvantaged and social mobility?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: Also for school food, including free school meals?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: And then a broader responsibility, I think, for the mental health of children and young people as well; is that right?

Mrs Vicky Ford: In schools.

Lead 8: In schools. Okay, so that’s probably quite an important delineation. You had a responsibility but there was also responsibility in the Department of Health –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: – for the mental health of children as well –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: – correct? And I think that within the scope of the mental health of children and young people, you also had a responsibility for online safety, as well; is that right?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Especially where it touched education.

Lead 8: Okay.

Mrs Vicky Ford: The primary responsibility was within DCMS and also owned by the Home Office to a certain extent.

Lead 8: You also had responsibility for policies to protect against serious violence, as well; is that right?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Again, often working with the Home Office on those issues.

Lead 8: And I think we’ll come back to that and work with the Home Office, as well.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: Now your –

Mrs Vicky Ford: If I can say, it was responsibility for England.

Lead 8: Yes, of course.

Mrs Vicky Ford: And obviously I reported to the Secretary of State for Education who had the overall responsibility for the department.

Lead 8: Yes.

So you are someone who sits within government described as the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children but did you have overarching responsibility for children within government?

Mrs Vicky Ford: So just like one minister won’t have responsibility for all adults and, I guess, it’s the key question we’ll come back to as an exam question is, should you have a Secretary of State for Children? I would argue that that is the education minister, is the overall responsibility for children but obviously children are touched not just by education and what happens in schools, not just by children’s social services but, you know, they use the NHS, they use transport, they use these other areas, as well. So often you’re needing to work with other ministers who also will have responsibility for children where they touch their departments.

You do have a convening power which is important. People listen to you because they know you will be talking to them specifically about children, so you’re respected across government in that way.

Lead 8: I think what the Inquiry might be specifically interested in is this issue of who looks at the child overall, and who looks at the cumulative impacts of decisions that are made about children? So, for example, in a pandemic, the decision to lock down, the decision made about children’s ability to play or exercise, children’s health. Those are not things that necessarily fall within the Department for Education –

Mrs Vicky Ford: They’re not, and – you know, where an issue in another government department is having a very serious impact on children, you will raise that even though that’s not your lead responsibility. So, for example, I would say online safety. Okay? Not my lead responsibility as children’s minister, but one that was clearly impacting children and one where clearly – you know, I could be convening the meetings and be spoken to for the specialist knowledge of the impact of children. But you can’t – I don’t think you can say, you know, take every bit of the health service where it touches a child, away from the Department of Health, and say that now needs to sit within a department just for children. I don’t think that would work either.

But there were lots of times when I attended cross-government meetings of ministers in order to raise issues pertaining to children and to be there, and serious secretaries of states were listening and taking that on board.

Lead 8: I think we’re probably –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Probably moving on a bit more, but yeah.

Lead 8: Yes, I think that we might have jump a hurdle. I think what we are just interested in at the moment is understanding whether there was a part of government during the pandemic that had oversight of the whole child, so the part of government that could say: we’ve had lockdowns, children’s ability to play is constrained, we can see impacts on mental health. In other words, bring the holistic picture –

Mrs Vicky Ford: I would say a lot of that came to me but I would also say there wasn’t a government department, other than Number 10 and the Cabinet Office, who would have that holistic approach to an adult.

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Okay? And you’ve got to have all members of government interested in all members of the population. Okay? So you – everything eventually goes through Number 10, or through the Cabinet Office as well, to bring it all together. And that is important. You can’t – couldn’t just say every decision has to come to one minister just because it’s a child as opposed to just because it’s an adult, if that makes sense. Okay.

Lead 8: Did you consider during the pandemic that that worked sufficiently well? In other words, I think you’re suggesting that you were the person who had that oversight of –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Where –

Lead 8: – all –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Where there was things happening in other government departments that were impacting on children, I had the opportunity to raise them. So, for example, I attended quite a lot of the Covid-O meetings, which were the operational meetings often at cabinet level but often the Secretary of State would delegate to me, and that would be a time when I could raise: we’re worried about this impact on children or that impact on children. And was always listened to.

Lead 8: And do you think, then, that that worked sufficiently well during the pandemic, in other words that – (overspeaking) –

Mrs Vicky Ford: I think when you look back on the decisions in the pandemic, not everything worked perfectly well. It was a really, really challenging time. It was very challenging for a lot of people and it was challenging for people of all ages.

It was particularly challenging for certain children and their families more than other types of children for their families, but it was also very challenging for some very much older people.

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: So, I don’t think anybody who was involved at the time can say everything worked perfectly well.

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: But that ability to holler that, shout out – you know, maybe we missed some things, but on the whole, if things were being brought to us as “This is an issue”, “This is an impact”, “This needs changes”, and there was lots of listening to things from the bottom up, you had that voice and people listened to you. Even though, you know, you’re the parliamentary under-secretary, new minister, et cetera, you’re still being listened to because people do care about our children. They did care about children.

Lead 8: All right. Well, we’ll come and look at some of the decisions that needed to be made and policy approaches in due course. I’m just focusing at the minute on how central government worked.

Some witnesses have suggested that decision making about education obviously, really, also decision making about children was too located in Downing Street and not sufficiently located enough in the Department for Education. Does that reflect your experience?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Was it Downing Street or it was the Department of Health? Um …

Lead 8: Sorry.

Mrs Vicky Ford: So there were definitely some things that I would have wanted to do and that I would recommend to my future self, if you ever had to live through this again, that public health would not have let us do because of the risk of spreading Covid more.

Lead 8: All right.

Mrs Vicky Ford: And we can talk about that. I was not responsible for decisions about closing schools, reopening schools, et cetera, and those were obviously some of the very high-profile discussions. But I know you’re talking to the Secretary of State so you can talk to him about that.

Lead 8: I’m just going to ask you a little bit more, if I may, about that, because when I asked the question you said, “Downing Street or the Department of Health”, I think the real issue is: was the decision not sufficiently proximate to the Department for Education as a starting point? In other words, were these decisions being taken by parts of government that didn’t have the insight or the expertise?

Mrs Vicky Ford: No, I wouldn’t – I wouldn’t say that, okay. So the really, really big ask that we had right at the beginning, you know, when that decision was to close schools, but to keep them open for vulnerable children, the possibility for vulnerable children to go to schools. That was a really big ask. Nobody had done that before, as far as I’ve been aware, from other countries. And it was something that Downing Street did. So they were listening to the big asks.

Lead 8: All right. Well, let’s – we’ll look at that –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Okay, but they obviously had to balance decisions about control of the pandemic, et cetera.

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: But yes, you did need to go and get things cleared, and there was a three-way clearing of processes to the Department of Health, DfE, and Number 10.

Lead 8: And did that impede decision making, as far as you were concerned, or was that just a necessary part of the process?

Mrs Vicky Ford: So I was wanting to say this later but – so for example, when it came to after the first lockdown, schools being locked down, I was very keen to push that all kids would have had the chance to be seen by their teachers at least once before the summer holidays, from a mental health sort of check-in point of view. But in terms of the public health desire to not unlock schools too quickly because of the impact on transmission, that was something we couldn’t get through.

I still think it’s something we should have done, but it was – and could have helped a lot of children. But it was the public health and I know that the Secretary of State who would primarily have had those really big discussions about school on lockdown and not lockdown, you know, it was constantly on the push of how much can I get reopening of schools through from a public health point of view.

Lead 8: Okay. I’m going to move on, if I may, to the outset of the pandemic, and bearing in mind that you took up your role on 17 February. When you did, were you made familiar with the reasonable worst-case scenario planning that had been commissioned on behalf of the department by Mr Rahman, who was then the Chief Scientific Adviser?

Mrs Vicky Ford: So I wasn’t the lead minister on pre-pandemic planning, that was with the schools minister and the Secretary of State were involved in that. I’m sure in my briefing pack, because I remember the weekend before I first walked in to the department spending a huge amount of time reading a lot of briefing, there would have been, I’m sure there would have been some briefing on it. I’d received briefings on Covid from the – from Chris Whitty, had been briefing MPs in Parliament beforehand. So I knew there was planning going on. And I started receiving briefings on Covid planning within weeks. I mean, admittedly, it was sort of a four-week period between becoming a minister, and it really accelerating it to – (overspeaking) –

Lead 8: I wonder if we can just have a look at the reasonable worst-case scenarios.

INQ000542908.

So we can see this was the sort of, at that time, the worst-case scenario figures that existed. I don’t think we need to look at those, but, for example, they set out things like the percentage of the workforce that might be off work at any time; correct? Are you familiar with that?

Mrs Vicky Ford: I’m not sure I saw exactly this document. I do recall discussing things like staff sickness planning. I recall going to visit my own local authority’s children’s social services team, and asking them what do they think we should need to be planning for, and them giving me feedback – this was early March – on needing to be able to approve new foster carers quickly from the ground-up level. So there was already discussions happening with local authorities, with the department, what sort of things do we need to be prepared for?

Lead 8: If we could just look, please, at page 3 of this. Thank you.

So there are a number of scenarios –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: – I think you’ve been provided with this –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: – that were directly relevant, I think, to children’s social care.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: So I think on page 3, if we look at box four, for example, the illness would lead to a lack of social workers.

If we go down a few boxes, please, that residential – that’s the one, 22 – residential care homes would require isolation?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: Below that, foster carers weren’t able to take children in placements.

Below that, schools were closed for a significant period of time.

If we go over the page, please –

Mrs Vicky Ford: And I recall feeding into this as well. I’ve mentioned Essex fed in some scenario planning that they were concerned about, recruitment of foster carers. I don’t know if it was as early as the date on this, but in early March – I’ve looked through notes since writing my testimony – you know, I’d fed in about concerns about children with SEND, keeping special schools open. Those concerns had come from MPs, for example: what are we going to do if that happens?

So feeding things in to the central planning of different scenarios is important.

Lead 8: Yes, I’m just going to stay with this, so I think the next one down:

“[Children] may be unwilling to allow social workers into their homes …”

Yes?

I’m not going to go through all of these, because there’s a number of pages, and I think if we get to page 7:

“How do we educate children who aren’t in school for a long time?”

So these were factual scenarios, weren’t they –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: – that were being posited from 6 February?

So this isn’t a plan, is it? This is a long list of things that the department might need to confront in due course, correct?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Well, if the question is should there have been more planning pre-pandemic, then the answer is obviously yes. But was this scenario planning going on an – important? Yes.

Lead 8: So I’m going to come to what this prompted but I think the first question is: this very long list of factual scenarios, when did that in fact prompt a plan or a document that responded to each of them?

Mrs Vicky Ford: So I had been being sent some Covid planning early March, I’d various meetings, with discussions. I think it’s fair to say that we were making plans assuming – I mean – how do I step back again?

The big concern with vulnerable children was: are you going to able to be keep eyes on vulnerable children? Because it’s so important to have eyes on for safeguarding, okay? And right up until the March 16th date, we had assumed that schools were going to carry on being able to stay open until Easter and then have Easter as a sort of fire break.

And what changed dramatically was the March 16 – the new analysis that happened, the new numbers being crunched that showed a much higher level of death, a much higher level of spread, that Covid was spreading much more quickly than anybody had predicted beforehand.

Lead 8: All right.

Mrs Vicky Ford: And that accelerated that suddenly we are going to need to go in to closing schools now and making those decisions much more quickly than had been thought beforehand.

Lead 8: The factual scenarios, the reasonable worst-case scenarios, they weren’t predicated on schools closing; I think these were a number of general scenarios.

Mrs Vicky Ford: They were general scenarios but it was sort of linked, you know, that how bad’s it going to be? It suddenly got a lot worse and a lot faster.

Lead 8: And so in terms of, if we’re separating out school closures from plans for vulnerable children, and keeping eyes on vulnerable children, when did the plans for keeping eyes on vulnerable children materialise?

Mrs Vicky Ford: So a key – so I think I had been sent documents back in … sorry, bear with me. I’d had a briefing on 4 March, I’d received a rolling brief on 14 February. There’d been a submission received on 27 February. On 6 March I had a meeting with my local authority to understand best how a well-performing local authority was thinking about that, that was one of the other things, I had another meeting to discuss the rolling brief on 11 March.

There were discussions – in that rolling brief, were discussions, feedback that they’d had from the Association of Directors of Children’s Services were the issues that were coming from them. So these were all happening, this bottom-up feedback into that type spreadsheet.

Lead 8: All right, but not a plan?

Mrs Vicky Ford: No, as I said, could there have been a better plan? Yes. Was I responsible for Covid planning within the department? No.

Lead 8: Well, I think I’m just trying to understand –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Okay.

Lead 8: – or explore at the minute how it is that the person who has responsibility for children and responsibility for responding to the scenarios –

Mrs Vicky Ford: So I was feeding in to submissions but I was not – there were two out of the five ministers in the actual meetings on Covid at that time.

Lead 8: Right.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Okay.

Lead 8: And I wonder if we can just bring up the statement, please, of Ms Oram –

Mrs Vicky Ford: And those – including in those meetings the lead minister who’d been in the department for many, many years. The schools minister at that time.

Lead 8: Do you mean –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Minister –

Lead 8: – Sir Nick Gibb?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Sir Nick Gibb. So he was the lead minister feeding in on these issues. I was feeding in questions and scenarios we needed to plan for. And when I say, as well as the scenarios, there were also different actions that we wanted taking.

Lead 8: So let me try and understand. When were you feeding to Sir Nick Gibb the planning, the eventualities that needed to be planned for? Was this in March?

Mrs Vicky Ford: So, for example, I was receiving briefings, I was having discussions with my team. They were briefing me on how their discussions were happening vis à vis Covid. I was raising points about them. I fed in to my private office who then fed in to the central planning on Covid the feedback I had received from my own local authority, ie, on we need to be able to approve foster care placements more quickly because we were really concerned that more children were going to need foster carers. We were really concerned because many foster carers are elderly and therefore may not be – they would have been clinically vulnerable themselves. So I’d fed that in on early March. I’d been feeding in comments I’d had from previous children’s ministers on children with special – children with disabilities, feeding that in to central planning earlier on, even though I was not the lead minister.

Lead 8: Right. So sorry, is this in March this was happening?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Early March.

Lead 8: Okay.

Can we just go, please, to Ms Oram’s statement. This is INQ000587996, thank you, and if we just go to page 5 and the bottom of that at paragraph 2.2. And this is picking up the chronology in March.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: I won’t read all of this out, Mrs Ford, and I think you’ve been provided this. She said:

“This, paired with reasonable worst-case scenario information received from the Scientific – SAGE – on 26 February … and the known existing pressures in the [children’s social care] system led to the identification of these 3 interrelated challenges …”

And then she exhibits two documents.

I think you’ve been provided with those documents, haven’t you?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: And I think one of them is, it’s just the SAGE reasonable worst-case scenario document, isn’t it? It’s not a Department for Education document.

Mrs Vicky Ford: I don’t know.

Lead 8: Are you familiar with that?

Mrs Vicky Ford: I don’t know, I don’t know.

Lead 8: I think if you will take it from me that that’s what one of them is.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: And the document ending 717 is a witness statement –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: – from June 2020 in the proceedings that were brought in respect of the adoption and coronavirus regulations; yes? I think you’ve been provided with that.

Mrs Vicky Ford: I’m really sorry, I don’t know which document the 26717 is.

Lead 8: Okay, so the document ending 896, if you can take it from me, that’s the SAGE reasonable worst-case scenario document.

Mrs Vicky Ford: From February?

Lead 8: Yes, I think it’s from February.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Which would have – my understanding is that the SAGE reasonable worst case that they were thinking in February, was actually not as bad as suddenly it appeared on the 16 March modelling.

Lead 8: Yes, I think at the minute I’m just identifying that these are not – the documents being referred to are not contemporaneous plans or documents that identify these challenges.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: Because I think the second document is a witness statement, in fact you can take it from me, it is a witness statement, in the judicial review proceedings that were brought about the adoption and coronavirus regulations?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: Just in terms of coming back to planning, as I understand it, these were the really significant challenges that had been identified within the department; is that correct?

Mrs Vicky Ford: And I think that is absolutely fair, okay? You’re potentially going to have far fewer opportunities to have eyes on children.

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: You’re going to have workforce pressures and children’s social services were already under a lot of pressure. It was different in different parts of the country, in different local authorities. And then there was, in the beginning, a real concern that we were going to see more children whose parents had died or were seriously unwell. So that we were going to see more children who were going to need care. And those are really, really difficult things to manage.

Lead 8: Yeah. So these were, I think –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: So can we take it, then, that these were the three –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: – the three significant planning assumptions?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: But not, as it were, I don’t think, but please tell me if I’m wrong, reflected in a planning document that we can identify –

Mrs Vicky Ford: I think you –

Lead 8: – prior to –

Mrs Vicky Ford: – I think you will find, in all of these, what types of things were we going to do to try to mitigate against these risks. Okay? There was a huge amount of work going on in different areas to try to mitigate against each of these different risks. You’re never going to be able to put a full sticking plaster over all of these risks, and say they don’t exist. But boy, were we planning for different things to mitigate this.

Lead 8: Okay. That’s what I want to can you about, and examine, because I think if we go on to read the next paragraph in Ms Oram’s statement, she sets out:

“As DfE identified these key challenges, officials began planning and acting to prioritise support for children and the frontline workforce.”

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: And I think what I’m just trying to identify is the point at which that planning began, and when, for example, the planning began in order to consider the position of vulnerable children in a way that reflected the factual scenarios that had been set out in mid-February.

Mrs Vicky Ford: So – and I can’t remember.

Lead 8: All right.

Mrs Vicky Ford: I can’t remember when I was first briefed that we were going to, for example, reopen the social workers register to allow people who had previously been qualified as social workers to come back to work, which was one of the workforce mitigations.

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Okay? I can’t remember the exact date at which that was first brought in place. I can remember that from the – when we suddenly had to accelerate the closure of schools, that we were pushing for vulnerable children to be on the list of people that should be kept open for schools.

Lead 8: Okay.

Mrs Vicky Ford: That was just … I can remember that we didn’t know we’d got it agreed until right at the very last minute.

Lead 8: All right.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Okay?

Lead 8: So when did the planning – let’s make it more specific, then. In terms of the planning for the position of vulnerable children in the eventuality that schools would close, when did the planning for that eventuality start?

Mrs Vicky Ford: So the decision that schools would close happened between 16 and 17 March, on the back of that information. The decision to push that they should stay – keep staying open for vulnerable children happened as soon as it became clear that schools were going to have to close much sooner than needed. And the – getting the green light to keep them open for vulnerable children was literally in that timeframe between then and the announcement.

Lead 8: All right. So I think is the really short answer to that, that that planning was pretty much contemporaneous with the decision to close schools?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Close schools, yes. But I’m sure that if the … we were trying to answer questions that no one had ever thought the question existed before, let alone what could the answer be. No one had thought about what if we have to close schools. And so once it became “We need to close schools”, it was, “But we need to make sure that we keep them for vulnerable children.”

Okay?

Lead 8: Are you saying no one had thought of that – (overspeaking) –

Mrs Vicky Ford: I can’t – I can’t – I can’t say that or not say that. I’m saying, as soon as the question was asked, “Who do you need to keep schools open for?”, we said key workers and vulnerable children.

Lead 8: But are you – sorry, I just want to be clear about this. Are you saying –

Mrs Vicky Ford: I had not been in the pre-planning meetings. So I don’t know whether Sir Nick had been saying “Keep them open for vulnerable children” since January, February, okay? Because I had not been in those meetings. I know that –

Lead 8: Had you –

Mrs Vicky Ford: – as soon as it was “We’re going to need to close them”, we were saying they need to stay open for vulnerable children.

Lead 8: Had you confronted the question, or the possibility that schools might have to close before 16 or 17 March?

Mrs Vicky Ford: I had been told by the Secretary of State and the schools minister that they were anticipating we would keep schools open until Easter.

Lead 8: Well, that only takes you to Easter, that’s –

Mrs Vicky Ford: I understand, and that that would be a firebreak during which time you would have this preparation, okay? It was all happening much faster.

Lead 8: Yes, so I think we can take it from that, then, that it was at the last minute for you, also –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes, but I was not the minister responsible. I was feeding in the ground-level feedback of the things that we needed to plan for. The closing of schools, happened in a huge rush.

Lead 8: Yeah, okay. I think that is probably what your witness statement reflects.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: But I just wanted to check this to make sure that we hadn’t – that the Inquiry hadn’t missed anything because you say at paragraph 4.3:

“I did not attend any ministerial meetings that considered the possible closure of schools between 14 February … and 16 March …”

Correct?

Mrs Vicky Ford: I don’t … no. I mean, I would not have attended the ministerial meetings, okay, that were considering those topics. We used to have quite high-level meetings between ministers on everything going on in the department, but I wouldn’t have – at which I do recollect, at one point, the Secretary of State saying, “We still think that Covid will be at Easter” and that was in the weeks before, that we will get through to Easter.

Lead 8: Okay –

Mrs Vicky Ford: That’s my recollection.

Lead 8: Yes, but can I – I mean, in terms of how things worked in the Department for Education, you have fellow – you have the Secretary of State, you have a fellow minister?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: This is – one understands the situation.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: But is there not sort of – is there not day-to-day contact and discussions between you and trying to –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Not necessarily every day.

Lead 8: – think about what would happen, what are – (overspeaking) –

Mrs Vicky Ford: We’d be feeding in – not necessarily every day. You might be out on visits, you’re probably back-to-back with lots of other issues. I was trying to set up a full review of the SEN system. We were launching the full review of the children’s social care system. We would have been absolutely back-to-back. We would have had a ministerial meeting once a week. We did have more joint ministerial meetings in that crunch week of 16 March. I remember Gavin coming back from the cabinet meeting at which these new numbers had been presented – in a very shocked state.

Lead 8: And you hadn’t been made, or provided with advice about what SAGE was saying from the start of February onwards, in terms of the possibility that mass school closures might at some point be needed?

Mrs Vicky Ford: I’m … I’m – I knew that we were discussing mass school closures but not that they were happening in that timeframe. If that makes sense. School closures were not being envisaged in that time frame and the plan was to get to Easter before you could then think about – and it – I don’t know if they were discussing every school being closed, not every school being closed, because I was not part of that. Okay? I know I’d received a briefing on – on 11 March, because I’ve – particularly in advance of coming here today, I’ve asked them to – the team at DfE to go back through all the briefings that I had prior to 16 March. I was not the lead minister on planning for Covid.

Lead 8: I’m going to –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Okay?

Lead 8: – turn to ask you about planning for vulnerable children and the children who fell within your areas of responsibility. You’ve, I think, explained in your witness statement that – and I’m – I think this is at 3.1, Mrs Ford:

“At the point at which I became aware (on 17 March) that it was likely that schools would need to restrict attendance …”

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hmm.

Lead 8: As I understand it, it was at that point –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: – that the officials within your department started to work up policy –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: – on which children would fall within the vulnerable children category; is that correct?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: So can you help with why that hadn’t been done beforehand, and why, as part of general planning, in the context of a pandemic – let’s put school closures to one side –

Mrs Vicky Ford: So schools had – I’m – schools had never closed like this beforehand. Okay? And the speed at which Covid was suddenly coming towards us, I don’t know if you remember how suddenly it …

It’s like – you knew there was danger around the corner, okay? I had been going to briefings. I was one of the very few MPs who had been turning up to Chris Whitty briefings. I remember the first time I turned up there were five MPs, from 750, had gone to a meeting on this weird disease. That was early January. So I’d been aware that this thing was coming, okay? We had been aware it was coming.

And then suddenly what it showed from the March 16th change, that analysis – I think it was the 16th or 17th – we were suddenly given a complete change of data and numbers that showed over a million people likely – not worst-case scenario, but likely – to die, if things didn’t happen very quickly. And they were – my understanding, completely different to the numbers that had been being shared previously. Okay? I don’t think I’d seen SAGE analysis before that. I don’t recollect that.

But suddenly, this new numbers were very, very different. And as a result, a much deeper lockdown was suddenly we’ve got to go.

Lead 8: All right. So do we take from that that it wasn’t until 16 March that it crystallised or that the penny dropped that there needed to be planning for vulnerable children in the context of a pandemic?

Mrs Vicky Ford: I think the penny dropped probably … I think that’s actually – I don’t want to use the word “crass”, but I think it was much more serious than a penny dropped. Sorry.

Lead 8: No, that’s all right.

Mrs Vicky Ford: It was incredibly serious. It was suddenly this disease, which was unknown beforehand, was spreading much more quickly, transmitting much more quickly than people had thought, and the potential death rate potentially much higher than people had thought. Okay? So … yeah.

Lead 8: So, to go back to my question, it crystallised, then? The threat crystallised on 16th March?

Mrs Vicky Ford: The threat changed.

Lead 8: Right.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Okay? The threat changed, because the – I mean, I’m a mathematician, okay? So that – and forecasting numbers were completely different to what had been seen before.

Lead 8: All right. So just to go back to my question, and to pin this down, was it 16 March and that change that prompted, for the first time, distinct consideration being given to planning for vulnerable children?

Mrs Vicky Ford: So, as I said, no, there had been planning for vulnerable children. Okay? I had fed into that, the week beforehand: we need to get guidance on children with severe disabilities. I’d fed into that too on 8 March, so, what, ten days beforehand: we need to put more thought on how to fast track more foster carers. So there were – there were planning going on.

The actual decision to close schools, and then what are we going to do about who can come to school, that was … um … I think things were also moving because, depending on how serious the threat was, and the threat as I said, just changed, depending on how hard Public Health were going to want to look down society, and therefore how deep they were going to want to do the lockdown of schools.

Lead 8: All right. So I think, then, it comes to planning for vulnerable children, and what would happen to them if they weren’t at school, that started on 16 March?

Mrs Vicky Ford: No.

Lead 8: No? Okay.

Mrs Vicky Ford: No. As I said, there were plans happening, of different bits, in fact all we’re going to need to do the actual, who should be allowed into school and not allowed into school, happened on 16 March.

Lead 8: All right. And was there a definition of who vulnerable children – who would fall within that category prior to 16 March?

Mrs Vicky Ford: No.

Lead 8: I just want to go back to your witness statement and just what you said happened on 16 March. I think you set out there that you – on 16 March, you met with directors and deputy directors responsible for –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: – children’s social care, SEND, Early Years, and free school meals, to understand how Covid-19 would impact on these areas. So was that the first time there had been that sort of meeting?

Mrs Vicky Ford: I think it’s the first time I’d brought them all together.

Lead 8: Right.

Mrs Vicky Ford: And I think I’d had discussions with them individually differently.

Lead 8: And then moving on, I think, on 18 March you’ve set out in your witness statement – and sorry, this is at paragraph 4.9 – that you met with the Director and President of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: So that was on the day that school closures were announced?

Mrs Vicky Ford: And I’d also met with her on 13 March, a week beforehand.

Lead 8: And when you met with her on 13 March, had the prospect that schools might close formed part of the discussion?

Mrs Vicky Ford: No, because it wasn’t under discussion.

Lead 8: Right, so that –

Mrs Vicky Ford: It was pre that.

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: I mean, I know it sounds – it probably sounds completely bonkers that on 13 March you wouldn’t have known what was coming, but it was such a big change in the numbers, such a big change in the spreads.

Lead 8: All right. I’m going to move on, then, to some of the policy that was promulgated in response to the decision to close schools and I think it obviously follows from everything that you’ve said, Mrs Ford, that none of that policy existed prior to 18 March; it was all formulated thereafter; correct?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Well, no, because I don’t know how much work Nick was doing on vulnerable children, as regards to school opening and school closing. Okay? So I don’t know that. Okay? I don’t know whether or not in – because he was the minister responsible for schools. Okay? What I do know is that there were discussions on how many children can we still have safely in schools.

Lead 8: All right. So if we just go to the first iteration of the policy, then, this is at INQ000541144.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Can you put that up?

Lead 8: I think it’s coming up.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Is this the –

Lead 8: We can go to the 22 March, if that’s …

Mrs Vicky Ford: Is this the 19 March guidance?

Lead 8: Yes, we have some guidance on 19 March.

Mrs Vicky Ford: So the 19 March guidance came out really quickly.

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: And this was primarily to get the list of who was an essential worker out into the public domain.

Lead 8: Right, and –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Okay? And there was a huge demand from parents to know whether or not they were going to be on the list of essential workers or did they need to plan for their other childcare and to be able to work from home, for example. So that came out really, really quickly. Two quite short pieces – pages on schools, but the rest of it was really the list on critical workers.

Lead 8: If we could just go to page 3 of this, please.

Mrs Vicky Ford: The – and that was followed a few days later with –

Lead 8: Slightly more –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Slightly more on what was a vulnerable child.

Lead 8: Yes, and I think the point is that this was issued on 19 March, as an immediate response to the announcement?

Mrs Vicky Ford: As an immediate response.

Lead 8: And we can see here that it sets out, and this is just from the – “And the most recent scientific advice”, so this is providing guidance, isn’t it –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: – as to which children would be entitled time to go to school, yes?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: So we can see the message in the paragraph below:

“That is why the government has asked parents to keep their children at home, wherever possible, and asked schools to remain open only for those children who absolutely need to attend.”

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: And we can, if we go down –

Mrs Vicky Ford: And as I said, this was in the background when – yeah, you know, every MP’s inbox was exploding with parents saying, “I do this, am I a critical worker? Can I have a place? Can I have a place? Can I have a place?”

Lead 8: Yes, I just want –

Mrs Vicky Ford: So this was to clarify – the point of this guidance on the 19th was mostly what the list of critical workers on the back.

Lead 8: Yes, but it was also to provide guidance, wasn’t it, to schools about vulnerable children –

Mrs Vicky Ford: To a certain extent, but I think it was three days later, four days later, a much more detailed guidance on vulnerable children came out.

Lead 8: But we can see the embryo of it here –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah, exactly.

Lead 8: – that “schools and all childcare providers are asked to provide care for a limited number of children, children who are vulnerable”.

Mrs Vicky Ford: And I think if you scroll down a bit, there’s this also, this important bit about “We know that schools will also want to support other children”.

Lead 8: Yes. And it doesn’t provide any detail about –

Mrs Vicky Ford: No.

Lead 8: – about who those children might be?

Mrs Vicky Ford: No.

Lead 8: And presumably that’s because there hadn’t been time to work up a policy as to that?

Mrs Vicky Ford: No, no. There was a very, very strong belief in the department that schools know their children best.

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: But no matter how much we in the department tried to put children in boxes, there would be children who didn’t fit in those boxes. And that schools would need flexibility to identify what we called “the other vulnerable children”. And we needed to give that to empower schools to be able to say: even though that child is not in your categorisation, that child is other vulnerable and needs to come in.

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Otherwise we would miss some children. Yes.

Lead 8: I think we can pick that up at page 1 of this guidance.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: So what is the definition of vulnerable children? And it sets out that it’s those who have a social worker and those up to the age of 25 who have EHCP plans; correct?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes. And other vulnerable children.

Lead 8: And other vulnerable children, absolutely. And we get that from over the page, don’t we? We know that – if we look, please, at page 2 –

Mrs Vicky Ford: This is on the next set of guidance, the –

Lead 8: We know that schools –

Mrs Vicky Ford: – 22 March guidance.

Lead 8: We know that schools and other education providers may also want to support other children who are vulnerable where they feel able to do so; correct?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: And eligibility for free school meals isn’t sufficient. Yes?

Mrs Vicky Ford: So you didn’t – you couldn’t have it too many children, okay? The – let me go back to what it said on 19 March. You know, people were being asked to stay at home, stay safe, stop the spread of Covid. Okay? But we wanted to make sure that if a school felt that a child was vulnerable or if the police felt this child was vulnerable, or a child without a social worker, needed to be at school for other vulnerabilities, that the school could still offer them a place.

Lead 8: Yes, and we’ll just come back and look at how that played out in practice, but obviously this guidance doesn’t go into any particular detail about the categories of children who might fall into that discretionary area for schools; correct?

Mrs Vicky Ford: No. And I think it’s … you know, when we initially closed schools, and maybe this was the optimism bias that I heard Indra Morris talk about this morning, you know, we thought it was going to be for a short period of time. So a lot of this was about safety of the child, and putting child safety first. So a child who’s on a – with a social worker, isn’t more likely to be facing more risk than a child without a social worker. Risks other than Covid. Which is why they were on the list –

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: – okay, from other risks. A child with an EHCP could be in a position where they needed – they would be more safe at school. They may be getting medical treatments, for example, in a special school that they couldn’t be receiving at home.

Lead 8: Can just ask you –

Mrs Vicky Ford: So that would be why the flexibility for them to be at school stayed.

Lead 8: Can we just touch, then, on that point –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: – and about flexibility – I’m sorry, go back to –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Sorry, just let me finish this thought. So as Covid changed and went on, the risk to the children changed as well, and the guidance evolved as well. We gave much more description about the types of children that may be in that other vulnerable category as – as Covid went on.

Lead 8: So if we could just, sorry, go back to the guidance –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Sorry.

Lead 8: – of 22 March.

This is INQ000520192, please, and page 9.

So this is still 22 March.

Thank you. It’s page 9.

So this was the guidance that specifically applied to children with these plans.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: And again, I’m not going to read through all of this. I think the first bit of it provides – sets out about the need for a risk assessment; yes?

Mrs Vicky Ford: So, if you can, section 13 is really important. Page 6. This is where it says:

“There is an expectation that vulnerable children who have a social worker will attend school …”

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: But for children with an EHCP, the expectation was that there would be a risk assessment, and depending on – which would involve the parents in that risk assessment. And that should help to decide whether it would be safer for that – children to attend school or not attend school.

So there was a different level of expectation at that stage between children with a social worker and children with an EHCP.

Lead 8: I see. I just want to focus on children with an EHCP plan.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Okay.

Lead 8: So we can see on paragraph 20, thank you, on page 9, so the first part under paragraph 20 provides for the risk assessment.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hm, mm-hm.

Lead 8: And then below that it sets out:

“We expect most children will fall into the following categories …”

And then we can see the first category is:

“Children and young people who would be at significant risk if their education, health and care provision and placement did not continue, namely those who could not be safely supported at home.”

Mrs Vicky Ford: Sorry, let me just read this. Yes.

Lead 8: And then, I don’t think we need to read all of it, if we go to the second bullet point:

“children and young people whose needs can be met at home, namely those who are not receiving personal care from their educational setting …”

So can we just, stepping back from that and where that left children who had those plans –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: – obviously had elevated needs, the reality is, what the guidance was saying is that the only children who should be coming to school are those who are receiving personal care; correct?

Mrs Vicky Ford: (Pause).

No, I don’t think that is what it says, because, you know, the – it explicitly says, if we go back to the paragraph before this one, “This may include those with profound and multiple learning difficulties”.

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: And there will be some children with profound and multiple learning difficulties who aren’t receiving personal care. Okay? It explicitly says that.

Lead 8: Can I just ask you the direct question, this guidance would seem to be narrowing the category of – that already quite narrow category of children with elevated needs, even more, first by requiring a risk assessment and then second by giving this guidance –

Mrs Vicky Ford: So –

Lead 8: – that children and young people whose needs can be met at home, namely those who are not receiving personal care from their educational setting, or whose limited need for personal care can be met in their family home.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes, but it says, “We expect most children will fall into one of those two categories”.

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Children who would be at risk if their placement doesn’t continue –

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: – because they couldn’t be safely supported at home, and within that, it explicitly says “This may include those with profound and multiple learning difficulties”, and then – so each child – there’s so many different levels of child’s needs for children who are on EHCPs. This is why each child, the policy was each child should be considered individually by those who know them best and a decision to be made: would they be safer at home or safer at school, okay?

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: And taking into account not only their health and care needs but other needs, as well. It explicitly says in the paragraph above “The potential impact to the individual’s wellbeing of changes to routine”, okay? So there may be some children who wouldn’t necessarily have personal care needs, but changes to routine could be really difficult for them.

Lead 8: So I think you’ve probably answered my question, but this guidance was really orientated towards safety, it’s not –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Absolutely … it’s very early on in Covid, where, you know, people were terrified of Covid. We didn’t know how dangerous Covid was for children. We did have some children with some very severe needs who died early on in the pandemic, so it wasn’t, you know, some children did die. A lot of this was about safety from Covid, and keeping children safe at home, isolated, low contact.

Lead 8: Can we just look at that then – (overspeaking) –

Mrs Vicky Ford: And later on, as it became clear that there were also risks from missing out in education, risks to mental health, et cetera, it became more flexible on that EHCP, but also fundamentally, it was that decision – and I know a lot of communication was done on this – was – meant to be co-produced with the parents and parents’ decision about whether or not the child would go into school.

Lead 8: All right. So if we look at the April guidance, please.

That’s INQ000519887, please.

And I think we can just go straight to page 3 on this and I think that continues to set out:

“As part of the response … educational settings have been asked to continue to provide care for a limited number of children and young people.”

Yes?

And then it’s set out here again, if we drop town. A couple of paragraphs:

“During the coronavirus … outbreak vulnerable children and young people are defined as those …”

Then we have the first bracket that we are familiar with, those children who have a –

Mrs Vicky Ford: And the sentence underneath that one –

Lead 8: That’s what I’m just coming to:

“… have an education, health and care … plan whose needs cannot be met safely in the home …”

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: So, again, the test isn’t can this child go to school who has a plan like this, it’s are they safe at home; correct?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: So, again, limiting, as it were, those children with those plans –

Mrs Vicky Ford: For their safety.

Lead 8: Well, it’s saying children “whose needs cannot be met safely in the home”. So it’s not asking the positive question: can a child with an EHCP plan safely go to school? It’s asking it from the reverse perspective.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Because, at the time, the mantra across all society was: stay at home, stay safe. Okay? So, for most children, they are not facing the risk that a child on a child protection plan might be facing, of being put at risk of physical harm in the home place; okay? If that makes sense. Okay?

So the safety for a child with a social worker was on a child protection from risk of other harms. The safety from an EHCP point of view was: do we need to have that child into school for their safety? Because they’re receiving other treatments or because they will find the changes to their routine too traumatic, et cetera. Or because their parents, as it said elsewhere, it said by – their parents won’t be able to manage to look after them without the respite that they get from school. So those were the issues.

Lead 8: I think this is really important, so that I’m just trying to get to the nub of this because –

Mrs Vicky Ford: I’m not sure why I’m not explaining –

Lead 8: No, I’m sure you are – (overspeaking) –

Mrs Vicky Ford: – I’m really sorry.

Lead 8: It might be thought from reading the guidance that it was thought that children with these plans ought to be able to go to school if they were physically well enough and able to, precisely because they have elevated needs and because they have plans that set out specific provision to help them develop and stay well. But it appears, from everything you’ve said, that that was very much not the policy – (overspeaking) –

Mrs Vicky Ford: No, that was not – they – where they had specific needs that could only be met in school, they were to go to school, or to be able to go to school. Okay? Where those needs could safely be met at home, they would stay at home to stay safe from Covid. Does – yeah.

Lead 8: Can I move on then to section 42 –

Mrs Vicky Ford: And with the flexibility that schools who know their children best can overrule all of this by using the other vulnerable category as well.

Lead 8: I mean, we know that children with education, health and care plans attended schools in very low numbers during the first –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: – lockdown, but it sounds, from everything you’ve said, as though that’s what you expected, that was the intended outcome?

Mrs Vicky Ford: That school would be there for them if they needed it.

Lead 8: I’m really asking you about the low numbers who attended and whether or not –

Mrs Vicky Ford: I think in the beginning, when our biggest concern was the risk to the child of getting Covid or not getting Covid, then yes. As it became – as we went on and schools were closed for longer, and therefore you were also concerned about the risk of them missing out on, as you’ve said, parts of their developmental support, their education support, et cetera, then there was a more – the risks became different, the risk assessment became different.

Lead 8: So just turning, then, to section 42 of the Children and Families Act, so that was the statutory obligation on local authorities to meet requirements that were set out in those plans, and one of the decisions you took was to loosen that obligation, I think, is a fair way of putting it –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: – so that it became one of reasonable endeavours; correct?

Mrs Vicky Ford: So, given that schools would be closed to most children –

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: – and that – I mean, this is really, really difficult, and I have experience of close family members who have brought up children with serious needs and seen how incredibly challenging it is to bring up children with – and the love that goes into those children’s families. I mean, it was really, really difficult. But in terms of safety, so they – it may have been safer for them to be at school – be at home rather than be at school. And some of those interventions that they might normally have got through their EHCP, you couldn’t provide, either because they weren’t at school or because their health workers in some circumstances weren’t able to provide those or they’d been diverted elsewhere. I can talk about diversions elsewhere, they shouldn’t have happened, some of those diversions of healthcare workers, I think that’s really, really important.

It would have put local authorities in an impossible position, trying to meet things that, you know, they couldn’t meet.

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Okay? So you wanted to try and give sensible steers in these very unprecedented circumstances for how local authorities should best try and react. Okay?

Lead 8: Can I just – I think there’s a very simple point about this. We’ve seen the letter that you’ve sent to the Children’s Commissioner explaining this.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: And that letter sets out that one of the reasons why that change was being made was because it was very difficult to provide services to children who weren’t in school; correct?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: And I think the point is that that left these children in a sort of lose-lose situation, if they – if they could be safely kept at home they were, but by dint of being at home, they weren’t having access to the services they needed?

Mrs Vicky Ford: I mean, I’ve really – I really, really don’t want to sound like an uncaring person, but there were so many lose-lose situations in Covid, okay? You … you know, if you’d sent your severely disabled child to school and they’d got Covid and brought it home and infected other family members, that’s pretty bad, as well. Okay? So there had to be individual risk assessments. I really strongly believe that parents should be involved, that was very clear in the guidance, that parents should be – this should be co-produced in consultation. It was parents’ decision, it says that in the guidance we set out on the risk assessments. Ultimately, it’s parents’ decisions whether or not they sent their children to school. Okay?

And that was really clear, but schools would be closed, most people would not be sending their children to school. Okay?

If I had a severely disabled child and my neighbour’s – and the school was too unsafe for my neighbour’s children who weren’t disabled, or I had an autistic child and it was unsafe for them but it was unsafe – you can see why parents would feel, I want to keep my child at home, okay? However, for some children they would be safer at school, okay? And some – and different special schools cope with different levels of disabilities and needs, so some of them would have more children than others.

The reasonable endeavours is a term I knew from my time in business as being an onerous condition, okay? You can’t – it’s a legal term. You can’t just say, “Oh, I was acting with reasonable endeavours” and then do nothing. Okay? There was pressure on the local authorities. They couldn’t just do nothing. They had to try and act reasonably meet those recommendations. We passed that for three months, and then we stopped. We were written to by the disabled children’s charities saying, “Please stop this because we think it’s too much” and we stopped it.

Sorry, I’m jumping about.

Ms Dobbin: My Lady, I think that brings us to the point of the adjournment.

Lady Hallett: Certainly.

You probably realise we take a break every so often for the stenographer, and you may welcome one as well, but I promise you we will finish your evidence this afternoon.

The Witness: Thank you. Sorry if we’re jumping about a bit.

Lady Hallett: 3.45.

(3.30 pm)

(A short break)

(3.46 pm)

Lady Hallett: Ms Dobbin.

Ms Dobbin: Thank you.

Mrs Ford, I’m going to move to the next topic which relates to the provision of social work to children during the pandemic.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: And I want to begin by asking you about some of the earlier guidance which changed, but I just want to go to it first so we can understand how it changed, and that’s at INQ000519580.

I think we can look at page 1 of this so I can orientate you in time, Mrs Ford. This is dated 3 April 2020.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: And if we go, please, to page 4. We can see under “Supporting the workforce”, if we go to the third paragraph, we can see that, if we look at the second sentence:

“Where authorities need to deviate from standard practice and statutory requirements, we expect that they will keep clear records to capture the rationale and risk assessment.”

Yes?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: And then I think at the bottom of that page it reiterates that message. So:

“… we accept that local authorities will struggle to meet some of their statutory duties at the moment.”

Correct?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: And I don’t think at this point in time, the guidance set out which of those statutory duties, for example, they may be struggling to comply with. Correct? That came a bit later.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: All right. And if we go to page 5, please, thank you. This relates to how social workers visit children and families; correct? And we can see it sets out that it was expected that local authorities and social workers would make judgements that balanced, and then it sets out different risks; correct?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: It explains that social workers and their managers were best placed to make professional judgements, and then the next paragraph down:

“We recognise that there are circumstances where it will be necessary for social workers and other staff to visit children in person. Where face-to-face work is deemed necessary, practitioners should take account of … (PHE) advice …”

Yes?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: And then if we go down a little bit further, “Do children’s social care staff need to use PPE?” It sets out:

“Where social workers and other staff are undertaking home visits, PPE is not required unless people being visited are symptomatic of coronavirus …”

Yes?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: Now, just a few questions arising out of this guidance. We’ll come back to the issue of local authorities not being able to meet their statutory obligations but just sticking with the question of social work visits, this guidance would appear to set up an assumption or a presumption that visits would not be face-to-face?

Mrs Vicky Ford: No.

Lead 8: You don’t agree with that?

Mrs Vicky Ford: No, I mean, this not good – not great guidance. It was produced in a real rush, you know, normally guidance would be hugely consulted on, take months to produce. It was produced in a rush. If you go right to the very beginning of this guidance, page 1, which you haven’t put up here, it really recognises that everything should be still child-centred, you know, take the view of the child first, and risk-based, look at your riskiest cases. So you’re not saying no face-to-face visits.

Bear in mind, though, that the public health message that’s going out is ‘Stay at Home’, ‘Stay at Home’, nobody should be allowed in the home. And, you know, public health didn’t want to dilute that message. Okay? So – and that was a constant, you know, push-pull between us and them; okay?

Lead 8: All right.

Mrs Vicky Ford: It probably should have said more clearly and I, you know, “There will be some times when only a face-to-face visit will do”, okay? If you’ve got a child who’s at risk in a home that you suspect might be being beaten up by their parents, you know, a face-to-face visit, yes, of course you should do it. But what is clear here is that it doesn’t say “no face-to-face visits”.

Lead 8: Right.

Lady Hallett: Can you remind me of the date, sorry to interrupt you –

Ms Dobbin: Yes –

Mrs Vicky Ford: This is 3 April.

Lady Hallett: 3 April. Thank you.

Ms Dobbin: Anyway, we can see what it says.

Let’s move to the Children’s Commissioner’s critique of that. That’s at INQ000239691.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: So she wrote on 6 April, didn’t she –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: – setting out the concern that – and we can see that in the second paragraph, that it, as we’ve seen, referred to statutory duties not being met, but didn’t refer to what they were; correct? That’s what she’s saying?

Mrs Vicky Ford: So we had already had circumstances when duties couldn’t be met.

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: I remember really clearly a case really early in Covid of – being brought to my attention, of a teenage child whose parents had both been blue-lighted into hospital on the same day. And the normal process for finding a safe place for this child, who has almost certainly been exposed to Covid themselves – you know, what do you do?

And the director of children’s services from the local authority had taken him into his own care, this child, taken him home with him, and decided to self-isolate with the child. You know, way beyond anything.

So you’d already had trying to do things outside the box.

What we wanted to do was get out this message: put the child first, and if you are stretched with resources or can’t do everything, go risk based. Okay?

By the time – the Children’s Commissioner then said, “This not clear enough, there needs to be more clarity, you shouldn’t just say you can break every rule”, you know, what – where should they use more flexibility.

I think we’d had a case even before 16 March, by the way, of a child who was in a children’s homes who had been told to self-isolate because they’d had Covid, by a GP, saying, you know, “Don’t go and see anyone.”

So, really difficult circumstances.

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: So the Children’s Commissioner saying, you know, “This is not clear enough” – and I totally take that, I agree with that – “You need to give more clarity on exact – what legal flexibilities there are.”

And we didn’t – just to get it off the record, we didn’t get everything right, she should have been properly consulted, there shouldn’t have been an asymmetric consultation. I wasn’t aware that there was. As soon as I saw the first draft of changes to regulations, the first question I asked was: what did the Children’s Commissioner say?

So I would like to put that on the record, that apology, okay?

Lead 8: I think you’re jumping ahead, rather, and at the moment I’m just focusing on social work visits and not the regulations.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: But I think – I assume you could have no argument to the point that the government couldn’t possibly just say to local authorities “We know you can’t abide by your statutory duties, do your best”, but that –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Be child centred and be risk based. Okay?

Lead 8: So –

Mrs Vicky Ford: So – and then – so that’s when we then moved on to, very rapidly – some would say almost too rapidly – making decisions about which flexibilities to try to give some direction. And if we hadn’t given some direction, then it could have been even more chaotic to local authorities, because they clearly would not have been able to stay within all the rules that they had.

Lead 8: I’m just going to stick with this letter if I may, please. And if we look, please – so we can see at the first paragraph she sets out the concern about what was said.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: She’d sets out – it’s the third paragraph down – that she thought there needed to be more strategic oversight.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: If we go over the page, please, to page 2.

She’s explaining that she has a dashboard. We don’t need to go into that for the moment. But she sets out then her key concerns about the guidance that had been issued. So sets out, for example, in relation to social work visits, that saying prioritising on the basis of risk wasn’t sufficient, because, for example, some of these visits were statutory. Presumably, some of them, the consequences, or what’s at stake, much higher?

Mrs Vicky Ford: So, in terms of the visits, the ones that we gave flexibility, were, for example, a social worker visiting a child in a children’s home.

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: That if – if, for example, there was Covid in the children’s home, then the visit couldn’t take place, then the visit could be done virtually, delayed – but could be. Not saying it had to be, but to give that flexibility.

Lead 8: So, Mrs Ford, at the minute I’m just focusing on –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah, sorry.

Lead 8: Maybe it would help if we clarified the different kinds of visits there might be.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: The regulations that were enacted dealt with looked-after children and visits to them, didn’t it? I’m talking about the adoption and coronavirus regulations.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: Separate to that, there’s all of the other social work visits that social workers undertake, correct, that didn’t fall within the remit of those regulations?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes, so we weren’t changing those.

Lead 8: So that’s – I’m focusing now on the changes that were made to that latter category of social work visits.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: But just to lay out some of the issues that were being raised, we can see the Children’s Commissioner worried about whether or not the visit is statutory should be factored in, and if we follow this on through, she sets out, doesn’t she, concerns about, I suppose, the practicality of some of the guidance that was being given? Yes?

Mrs Vicky Ford: She does. And she asks for more clarity, which is what was then worked towards.

Lead 8: Yes. So that’s what I want to come to.

Mrs Vicky Ford: There were very, very intense periods of discussions that were happening from ground level up, so speaking to, for example, the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, where would they need more flexibility in the system?

Lead 8: Yes. So if we go to the 6 May guidance, this was enacted and this was after the regulations had been –

Mrs Vicky Ford: They went hand in hand.

Lead 8: Yes. So this guidance was intended to provide guidance about the circumstances in which the regulations could be used; correct?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: And also about how children’s social work visits would be carried out; yes?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: So I think if we look, please, at page 1 of this, just to put it in context. I think we have the date, 6 May. Thank you. And if we can just go to the – perhaps page 3 of this guidance. Thank you.

So this explains – again, I don’t think we need to go through all of it, but it is just setting out, for example, and reiterating, we can see the third paragraph –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: – that local authorities were still subject to these general duties.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: So reiterating that.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: Thank you. And then below that – thank you – that amendments had been made to provide for some extra flexibility; yes?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: And so we can see there “only used when absolutely necessary”?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: And then below that, “The amendments will remain in place for so long as is needed.”

So I just, again, Mrs Ford, to be fair, this is guidance that you have – or the department has enacted in response to what the Children’s Commissioner has said about the need for greater safeguards –

Mrs Vicky Ford: In response to what we were hearing from the ground, as well. Okay?

Lead 8: Okay.

Mrs Vicky Ford: And also, in this guidance on the next page it says there should be no blanket changes to social care.

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Okay? There should be – and I think that’s really, really important, okay? In the guidance, which went out with the regs, no blanket changes. So flexibilities only where needed with senior management oversight, kept reports, reports could be fed into Ofsted, Ofsted could use them in the supervision of your local authorities. So yes, we were giving flexibilities, but with safety nets and without blanket changes.

Lead 8: Can I just, just on the subject of the regulations, that’s all I’m focusing on, this idea that there was oversight by Ofsted, Ofsted weren’t involved in the routine gathering of the use of those regulations, were they?

Mrs Vicky Ford: So they had to keep records, and if you go back on to the page it should be available to share with Ofsted and may be used by Ofsted’s annual engagement meetings.

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: So Ofsted are the inspector of local authorities for –

Lead 8: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: – for children’s – (overspeaking) –

Lead 8: I think, just to be clear about it, it wasn’t that Ofsted were just monitoring –

Mrs Vicky Ford: No, not at that stage, but it was, you know, you will be in – the message you will be inspected or you could be inspected on: have you used this appropriately, yes. It’s an important safeguard.

Lead 8: Page 6, please, of this guidance. This what I really want to focus on, please.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: These opening paragraphs of the guidance are talking about the amendment regulations. This part of the guidance is talking about the provision of social work visits in general, isn’t it?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: So this is where we get the meat of, for example, how child protection visits would be carried out; yes?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: As is set out underneath:

“There should be no blanket changes to social work practice …”

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: “… but coronavirus … brings additional risk and complexity and may necessitate some different ways of working …”

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: “We expect local authorities and social workers to make judgements about visiting which prioritises children’s welfare as paramount …”

Yes?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: “Balancing” – and these are the same issues we have seen before – so having to balance risks to children, families and to the workforce; yes?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: The same language as before, “best placed to make professional judgements” to decide what form of contact they need to maintain.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm-hm.

Lead 8: And again, this phrase “Where face-to-face work is deemed necessary”, practitioners should take account of the advice on social distancing.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Lead 8: And, again, reading down:

“There are many ways to keep in touch with a child, young person or family without physical face-to-face contact and it is expected that these will be utilised appropriately and proportionately in response to the risk assessment undertaken for the child on a case-by-case basis.”

So can I just ask you again, this is the guidance that covers the bulk of visits that social workers would make to children, isn’t it? The regulations only apply to some specific statutory visits.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes. I assume so.

Lead 8: So why was the test here – or why was the general guidance where face-to-face work is deemed necessary rather than the other way round? Why is the presumption here, when it comes to these visits, that face-to-face work –

Mrs Vicky Ford: So you can have your –

Lead 8: – would not be in person –

Mrs Vicky Ford: – statutory visits that – and then – so I’m not a social worker, but my understanding is that – you know, having spoken to lots of social workers and met many during this period, and if a child – if an incident has happened to a child or they suspect an incident has happened to a child, they will make a decision about whether or not they think a face-to-face visit is necessary. And that would be normal practice, to decide whether or not you need to go and see that child or not see that child.

Lead 8: But in the context of pandemic, why isn’t it, again, the reverse? Why isn’t the assumption that a child would be seen in person unless that couldn’t happen?

Mrs Vicky Ford: So not every call to a social worker is going to end up in a social work visit.

Lead 8: No.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Even in normal circumstances. Okay? This is not saying: you can’t do visits. It’s saying: where you think you need to, do a visit, and there should be no blanket changes to social work practice.

So if you’ve got, I don’t know – at the beginning of the pandemic, we were even thinking that we might have a third social workers off sick from time to time, and be planning up to that, actually. Sometimes it was lower. Fortunately, it was lower than that.

But if you’ve got social workers off sick, how do you prioritise your visits? Okay? Do you do a – as somebody who is much more involved in social work practice than me, do you use your visits and your limited capacity to visit a teenager who’s in a long-term stable placement with a foster carer, that is probably low risk, or do you go and visit the family of the 2-year old where you’ve had a call from the police that there was a domestic abuse incident the night before, even though you didn’t know that child, they’ve never been on your risk register before, you think they may be at risk, the police said they were really concerned about them?

I suspect you’d go and visit the child that the police said that they were really worried about the night before. Okay?

And that’s – you’re – you’re deeming that a face-to-face visit is necessary rather than the statutory visit that you may have needed. And this was to give that flexibility. And the important thing, if necessary, if you had such staff sicknesses, that’s what we wanted to make sure: that decisions would be risk based, child centred, rather – let’s say you had a social worker off sick. Do you – if you’re not giving any guidance, what, then, does the local authority do? Do they say, “Well, the social worker that’s off sick, nobody is going to go and see their list this week”? Or “We’re going to be risk based and decide those with the highest risk one, and even though this social worker is off sick, we’re still going to go and visit them, admittedly with a different social worker”?

So none of this was perfect. It probably could have been clearer. Public Health England would constantly have tried to say the ‘Stay at Home’, ‘Stay at Home’, ‘Stay at Home’. You needed to make it clear that it was okay to make face-to-face visits where necessary.

Lead 8: Well, that’s what I was coming to. I’m not going to take you through the various things that have been put in your – drawn to your attention in your witness pack, like the evidence from Professor Driscoll, or from the serious case review, for example –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Lead 8: – that obviously raise issues as to the way that social work was carried out, and the use, for example, of remote visits in certain circumstances –

Mrs Vicky Ford: So, so –

Lead 8: – and the broad concern that has been raised that the guidance wasn’t sufficiently clear –

Mrs Vicky Ford: So – can I just talk about those four child death reports that you were asked me to comment on?

They are awful. And I read every serious incident report that came through during my time as Children’s Minister. And you were constantly thinking: is there something we’re missing here? Some group of children who could be at risk that we are not addressing?

I’ve re-read all of those serious incident case reviews, and you can’t say it was the lack of social worker face-to-face visits that was the critical turning point, okay, in those cases.

In the case of the death of Arthur, there was a social work visit, and the incident report – review clearly says that Covid-safe working had some impact, but it also says that the – what the Covid-safe working that had an impact was the fact that team meetings between social workers and their managers were happening online not face-to-face. And that was what meant that the social worker who went on that visit was not as well briefed, as it were, on what she was looking for.

So the face-to-face visits, at least in the case of Arthur, of Finley, known as Theo, of Jacob, they were still happening. There were other issues of sharing information, parents trying to hide their case – their child, like in the case of Theo. Probably easier to hide your child from a social worker if you kept telling the social worker they had Covid – because of Covid. But it wasn’t lack of face-to-face.

Face-to-face visits are really important, especially for really young babies. And it’s really important that they use those face-to-face visits even in a pandemic. But they’re not so important for some others. And that was the flexibility we were trying to give.

Now, maybe the guidance could have been clearer and maybe a good recommendation from this should be give clearer guidance that they are allowed, et cetera. But you have to trust the professionals to make that decision, about whether or not they use them, and to still be able to use them, and to say there shouldn’t be a blanket change. Use your flexibility but use it in a risk-based way.

Ms Dobbin: My Lady, those are my questions. I think there are questions from Core Participants.

Lady Hallett: There are. Mr Twomey, who is over that way, Mrs Ford, can you see him around the pillar.

The Witness: Thank you. Thank you.

Questions From Mr Twomey KC

Mr Twomey: Good afternoon. On behalf of Article 39, a couple of questions.

In the course of the Court of Appeal hearing of the judicial review proceedings brought by Article 39, concerning the amendment regulations, the DfE conceded it was not part of the Secretary of State’s case that there was insufficient time to consult the Children’s Commissioner and other bodies representing children’s rights.

You approved the regulations without the Children’s Commissioner’s views. You say you did this on the proviso that you wanted to know her views, but the email to the Children’s Commissioner merely advised her of the changes and did not expressly seek her views. What does this approach to the Children’s Commissioner and the failure to consult with children’s rights groups before approving the amendment regulations say about the DfE’s approach to children’s rights at the time?

Mrs Vicky Ford: So, first of all, can I start by thanking Article 39. I think you do a really good job in standing up for children. They should have consulted equally, okay? This was a time that was, as you know, unprecedented. Okay?

What does it say about DfE at the time that we – I mean, I understand conversations were happening with her, but there weren’t in-writing conversations and there probably should have been and I apologise for that. I don’t think that that was an attempt, as I say in my witness statement, to cut her out. I think it was an oversight. The first question I asked was “What’s her view?” And she was obviously – wanted to be consulted. However, she had asked, as per that letter, for greater clarity to be given, which was what was trying to happen.

I still believe that the main thing that was being done in trying to pass those regulations was trying to operate in a way that put children first and the children at greatest risk first. And, you know, another pandemic, things might be different. But in the pandemic that we were in, we were really concerned to try and make sure that things like the foster care system could hold up as well as it possibly could, so giving flexibilities to, for example, the medical approval of foster carers who move on and get their medical approval later, was a really sort of practical, sensible thing to do, which would keep systems working for children, make sure that you had a support system for children, at a really difficult and unprecedented time. But it shouldn’t – they should have consulted her.

Mr Twomey KC: Well, they should have consulted because –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes, and I’ve said that, and I’ve apologised.

Mr Twomey KC: There would be another side of the coin, wouldn’t there? I mean, the Court of Appeal said the consultation was entirely one-sided, excluded the most directly affected by the changes, vulnerable children, to use your own words: your big concern was to have eyes on the vulnerable child. Did you just lose sight of children’s rights?

Mrs Vicky Ford: No.

Mr Twomey KC: Were they never in your sights?

Mrs Vicky Ford: No, there was not a losing sight of the most vulnerable, okay? The – in terms of face-to-face visits, this was saying, you know, if you can’t organise face-to-face visits with birth parents because the child is in a foster care placement, then that’s not necessarily the most vulnerable.

I mean, it would be really difficult for the child, for some children. A really, really big issue that I know that you care about and I care about a lot is the deprivation of liberty. And it was really, how can you try and look after a child where they’ve got Covid, been told to self-isolate, and we were, especially in the second iteration of that, really clear that that should be only used in those very specific circumstances of self-isolation. So –

Lady Hallett: I think we seem to be moving away – forgive me –

Mrs Vicky Ford: – (overspeaking) – sorry.

Lady Hallett: It’s all right, Mrs Ford, we’re moving way, Mr Twomey has really limited time so if you could just focus on the question I’d be really grateful.

Mrs Vicky Ford: So I wouldn’t say we weren’t having eyes on vulnerable children, we were really trying to keep no blanket changes, flexibility only where absolutely necessary. So, for example, that deprivation of liberty which was a big issue, only where absolutely necessary.

Mr Twomey: Removing regular visits within a fixed timescale was a blanket change, wasn’t it?

Mrs Vicky Ford: No.

Mr Twomey KC: Let me move on to, if I may, to INQ – it’s an email chain – INQ000643071. And this is email correspondence between someone from the DfE and the Association of Directors of Children’s Services. The email at the top of the first page timed at 11.02, beginning “My only other comment”. I think it’s the third sentence:

“We must do all we can to protect [local authorities] from legal action after all of this is over – it will cripple [local authority] budgets if they’re having to deal with JR, etc”.

Were you aware of the concerns raised in this email about the potential for legal action crippling local authority budgets post-pandemic before you approved the amendment regulations?

Mrs Vicky Ford: I really don’t know. I’m really, really sorry, but that is not the reason why I approved the amendments. We approved the amendments because it was already very clear from the bottom up that some flexibilities were going to be needed. Okay?

Mr Twomey KC: Were you aware of these concerns?

Mrs Vicky Ford: I really don’t know. Okay? I don’t think so.

Mr Twomey KC: So were local authorities’ budgetary concerns weighed in the balance against the wellbeing of vulnerable children?

Mrs Vicky Ford: No, the wellbeing of vulnerable children was always my concern. Okay?

Mr Twomey: Thank you, my Lady.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Absolutely.

Lady Hallett: Right. Are you all right? It’s been a long afternoon.

The Witness: I’m telling the truth.

Lady Hallett: Now, if we could – if the other advocates who have got permission could restrict their questions to what’s absolutely necessary. It has been a long afternoon.

Ms Iqbal.

Ms Iqbal is that way.

The Witness: Thank you, Ms Iqbal, thank you.

Questions From Ms Iqbal

Ms Iqbal: Thank you, my Lady.

Good afternoon, Mrs Ford. I’m asking you this question on behalf of Clinically Vulnerable Families.

In section 13 of your witness statement, that’s pages 74 to 81, if you want to remind yourself, you discuss, broadly, multiple charities and programmes working to support recovery of children’s mental health after the peak of the pandemic, but none that specifically focus on issues faced by CVF’s members.

So, many children in Clinically Vulnerable Families experience severe mental health impacts from things such as bereavement if they lost a loved one, anxiety from trying to protect vulnerable family members, and ensure they weren’t infected, as well as the effects of social isolation, to name but a few.

My question for you this: do you agree that there should be specialist support available to these children to help them recover mentally from the trauma that they faced?

Mrs Vicky Ford: I think it must have been really difficult for children who were with shielding families. But I think it was really difficult for an awful lot of children. Okay? Children with an elderly grandparent who wasn’t necessarily shielding, children who lost – bereaved – family members, who weren’t shielding.

And I think we did a lot at the time to try to improve mental health support. We were rolling out mental health support teams in schools and training people as fast as you physically could to train people into those roles. We rolled them out faster during the pandemic. So I would put them as – I wouldn’t like to necessarily say that every child who had a shielding parent or relative necessarily needs the same support. Okay? I would like to see more support for children and young people holistically, but I’m not sure that they would necessarily want to be categorised either. So I’m not sure. I’m not sure.

I do know that, you know, support and mental health support and bereavement support for those who lost parents at that time, struggled at that time, it’s really hard.

But I think every child would have been different in what support they would have needed, and I would have hope that a lot of that would have been support from their school.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much, Ms Iqbal.

Ms Iqbal: Thank you, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Ms Irving.

Questions From Ms Irving

Ms Irving: Thank you, my Lady.

Mrs Ford, I appear on behalf of Disabled People’s Organisations. On 29 May 2020, almost 50 charities and organisations who work with disabled children and their families wrote to you.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Ms Irving: They raised significant concerns about what we’ve heard described earlier as the loosening of the legal duty to secure provision for the children with EHCP plans.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Ms Irving: You described the reasonable endeavours duty earlier as an onerous condition.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Ms Irving: However, that letter stated that local variation was taking place in the interpretation of the reasonable endeavours duty, and that therapeutic interventions were not being provided to disabled children with potential long-term impacts for their health and wellbeing.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Mm.

Ms Irving: In your evidence you also emphasise that, from 1 August, local authorities and health partners were again under an absolute duty to secure –

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yeah.

Ms Irving: – that provision, but despite this, as late as April 2021, a survey by Disabled Children’s Partnership found that 67% of parents reported their disabled child was still not accessing all the support in their plan, with over 50% still unable to access occupational therapy, speech and language therapy, or physiotherapy.

Given this, do you accept that the monitoring and accountability mechanisms in place during the pandemic were not sufficient to ensure that local authorities complied with their duties to children with education, health and care plans, whether that was to use reasonable endeavours to secure the provision for them, or, from 1 August, the absolute duty to secure that provision? And in particular, do you accept it was not enough to rely on self-reporting by local authorities in conversation with members of your department?

Mrs Vicky Ford: So, thank you for the question. Thank you for all you do for disabled children.

I fully accept that not all local authorities were meeting conditions under EHCP plans. They weren’t. The SEND system was already under really extreme pressure, as you know, before Covid even started, and Covid exposed even more, and it was one of the reasons that we were doing the SEND review – which continued to be worked on even despite the pandemic. I continued to work on and push on that, and I wish more recommendations from that had been implemented by now.

I’d like to say thank you for that letter and, as I recall there were subsequent meetings on a lot of points that were raised on that letter, and that letter and the feedback from the charities you represent is one of the reasons why those flexibilities weren’t extended again, and more pressure to keep more pressure on local authorities.

But we did have some real struggles getting therapies backed for children. Okay? There was real struggles with, for example, speech and language therapists. Very difficult to do speech and language therapy in a socially distanced way and with a face mask. I remember going right up to the deputy head of public health on: can we use clear masks for speech and language? And I remember it being really difficult for deaf children as well, that whole issue of face communications.

The NHS being under huge pressures when we came out of lockdowns as well, which meant that medical provision was still being taken elsewhere.

So getting those therapies back, yes, was a real, real struggle. It was not perfect at all. And yes, disabled families often have to fight far too much to get support for their family – for their children.

However, I do think that we tried to do as much as we could to keep children safe in the first instance, and then to try to reopen more and more towards disabled children. And I know I championed to try to get some of those barriers lifted as much as possible, but it needs reform, the SEND system.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, Ms Irving.

Mr Broach?

Questions From Mr Broach KC

Mr Broach: Thank you, my Lady.

Mrs Ford, I have a question from the Children’s Rights Organisations.

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes.

Mr Broach KC: The evidence from the British Association of Social Workers this morning was that children in the care of local authorities are more vulnerable than those in parental care. The Inquiry has heard that during the pandemic there was a lack of oversight of the increased risk to children in care, Ofsted ceased all inspections from April 2020 until September 2020 for local authorities with only assurance visits after.

In that context, what work, if any, did you do to safeguard these particularly vulnerable children?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Children in care?

Mr Broach KC: Yes.

Mrs Vicky Ford: So many children in care would still have been being visited. That may have been an online visit, though, I admit. Okay? And they had the ability to be at school and if they were not going to school then that would have been followed up. Okay? So I think that was a really important thing that maybe didn’t come out this morning; if they weren’t at school, it was being followed up.

I know you want to finish – if I can, my Lady. There’s a couple of other things I’d like to put on your radar as sort of letters to my future self. The care of really very young children, we mentioned: please don’t redeploy health visitors. I think more should have been done for support for families of the very young children. Later on in the pandemic, double bubbles came out. That might have help families of really very young children.

The biggest thing we did to try to help stop serious incidences was that check on previously vulnerable families. A lot of these additional deaths of really young children happened with families that had been on child protection plans in the past and then had lapsed.

I still don’t think we understand fully the impact, on really very young children, of the pandemic. In your survey that you did, it was only the voices of older children. How were 6 months to 3-year-olds really impacted? And I think more thought needs to be done to that.

And I spoke earlier about not leaving children for so long before a general check-in for all children, including children in care, those who hadn’t been going to school.

I’m sorry, I thought I’d answered your questions.

Mr Broach KC: Mrs Ford, may I just check, was the increased vulnerability of looked after children, children in care, recognised in the pandemic in a context where Ofsted weren’t inspecting local authorities for six months?

Mrs Vicky Ford: Yes, it was. And that was why we did as much as we can to try to keep eyes on in other ways.

Mr Broach: Thank you.

Thank you, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, Mr Broach.

That completes the questions we have for you, Mrs Ford. I’m really grateful. I do appreciate what a tough afternoon it has been for you revisiting distressing periods of your working life. And obviously, we approached you at a very difficult time to help us. So thank you for all that you’ve done to help the Inquiry.

The Witness: Thank you.

Lady Hallett: And that’s it.

The Witness: Thank you.

Lady Hallett: Very well, I shall return for a 10.00 start tomorrow.

(4.29 pm)

(The hearing adjourned until 10.00 am the following day)