06/11/2025: Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls: New Laws Improve Prosecution Time
This week, the UK Government announced new laws designed to strengthen efforts to tackle violence against women and girls.
(Source: South West Grid for Learning)
05/11/2025: Child protection enquiry numbers hit record high, but significant harm found in less than third of cases
Many families being ‘dragged unnecessarily into an intrusive system’, to face blame, rather than receive support, says charity, in echo of now children’s minister Josh MacAlister’s Independent Review of Children’s Social Care.
05/11/2025: Government launches independent review of Social Work England
Former College of Social Work and national safeguarding lead Annie Hudson will lead statutory review of Social Work England and make recommendations on future regulation of profession.
05/11/2025: Almost 30% of people abused as children, England and Wales data shows
ONS data, which includes emotional, physical and sexual abuse as well as neglect, suggests 13.6 million people affected.
03/11/2025: Parents’ shoe protest for better Send support
Families have lined-up pairs of children’s shoes outside council offices to symbolise pupils with Special Education Needs and Disabilities (Send) being “failed” by the system.
03/11/2025: Online porn showing choking to be made illegal, government says
Online pornography showing strangulation or suffocation is to be made illegal, as part of government plans to tackle violence against women and girls.
30/10/2025: Almost all children in 73 areas of England live in low-income households
New official measures show levelling up attempts have failed to shift high levels of deprivation.
28/10/2025: 45% rise since 2022 in number of children waiting for adoption, as adopter numbers plummet
Charity urges reinstatement of national adoption register – scrapped six years ago – to tackle increasing waits for children as sector leaders cite cost of living as cause of decline in adopter registration numbers.
27/10/2025: ‘Why recognising parents as victims is essential to tackling child to parent abuse’
CPA is typically either criminalised within the youth justice system or reframed as a child welfare issue, leaving parents to suffer in silence and children unsupported, writes legal researcher Sharon Davis.
23/10/2025: One in 12 secondary pupils put in isolation rooms at least once a week, study finds
Children with special educational needs more than twice as likely to be put in isolation, say Manchester researchers.
22/10/2025: Reform of special educational needs system delayed until 2026
The government is delaying reforms to the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (Send) system and other policy proposals for schools in England until next year.
22/10/2025: Government to scrap presumption of parental involvement ‘to protect children from abusive parents’
Move hailed by domestic abuse campaigners after government review finds that it is part of ‘a pro-contact culture’ in the family courts that leaves some children at risk of harm.