On 25 September 2025 the Department for Education published a response to the Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s report, published in April 2025 ‘Victims in Their Own Right?, Babies, children and young people’s experience of domestic abuse’.
The Commissioners report it made 66 recommendations across seven key areas, including: centring children’s voices, strengthening cross departmental working, sustainable funding, data and evidence, specialist training, safeguarding and ensuring practice is informed by specialist knowledge.
In reply, the Department for Education points to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill as a a central plank of reform, designed to protect children at risk of abuse and neglect and to ensure that children affected by domestic abuse are ‘safe, healthy, happy and treated fairly’.
Key Government Reforms:
The response identifies several flagship reforms with the Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) strategy. They believe that it will have a significant impact on tackling domestic abuse for children at different stages of their interaction with professionals.
Their response includes several measures:
- Family Help and Child Protection Reform: Scaling best practice through the Family First Partnership programme, which focus on addressing family needs and risks including a response to domestic abuse through the system.
- Curriculum Reform: Updating the Relationship, Sex and Health Education curriculum to equip young people with the knowledge and skills they need to build positive relationships and to recognise abusive behaviour.
- Social Work Training: Strengthening the skills and capabilities of child and family social workers to identify and address domestic abuse through a new Social Work Induction programme.
- Information Sharing Duty: Implementing a new duty for information sharing that provides a clear legal basis to share information for the purposes of safeguarding and promotion of welfare, including domestic abuse.
Safeguarding Reforms in the Bill:
The Governments response to the safeguarding recommendations (54-61) leans heavily on the reforms of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which has now passed the Lords Committee stage. The Bill is set to deliver:
- Enhanced role for schools and childcare providers in multi-agency safeguarding recognising their frontline role In identifying abuse and neglect.
- New multi-agency child protection teams (Social work, health, police, education) working alongside specialist domestic abuse services to provide coordinated, timely support for families.
- A legal duty for information sharing and the introduction of a Single Unique Identifier (SUI) to ensure consistency across services.
- Restrictions on elective home education: Parental consent to withdraw a child from school will be subject to Local Authority approval where the child is on a Child Protection Plan, subject to Section 47 enquiries, or in a special school arranged by the Local Authority.
- Stronger school attendance order powers, allowing Local Authorities to intervene where children subject to child protection measures would benefit from being back in school.
Looking Ahead:
The government argues that, together with the upcoming Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy, these reforms will provide a stepped change on how domestic abuse affecting children is recognised and addressed.
However, the effectiveness of these measures will demand on implementation, resourcing, and cross-agency coordination. With children explicitly recognised as victims of domestic accuse in their own right under the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, the sector will be watching closely to see if these commitments deliver a meaningful change in practice.
