Recommendation 10

We asked the Department whether its definition of ‘vulnerable children’ remained relevant in light of the pandemic. The Department explained that two elements of the definition that it used to decide who could access a school place—children with a social worker or an EHC plan—were fixed. But the definition also included an important third category, which was those children whom schools considered vulnerable in other regards. This allowed schools flexibility to take account of factors such as wider home circumstances or mental health issues, and to make sure that places could be made available to the children whom schools knew would suffer if they were not able to access 7 Q 10 8 Q 25 9 Q 26 10 Qq 11, 25 11 C&AG’s Report, paras 2.3, 2.5 12 Q 51 13 Q 24 14 Q 51 10 COVID-19: Support for children’s education face-to-face education.15 We challenged the Department about whether schools generally understood and felt empowered to apply this aspect of the definition. The Department agreed to consider whether its guidance could have made clearer that schools had this discretion, and what it could do to help make sure that people felt empowered to make those decisions.16