This month we have launched an inquiry into how schools are monitoring and recording their use of restraint, following widespread concerns about its use and the lack of data available.

Restraint can be distressing and can have a significant impact on anyone, but it can particularly affect children.

To understand if restraint and seclusion methods are used appropriately in schools, it is important to monitor and record its use. However, unlike in other institutions such as child and adolescent mental health units and young offender institutions, there is no legal duty on schools to record incidents. This has resulted in a lack of transparency and almost no official data on how and when restraint is being used.

Our inquiry will find out whether primary, secondary and special needs schools in England and Wales are collecting information and if so, whether they are using it to inform any improvements to how they use restraint. 

Find out more about the inquiry here

We have launched a legal challenge against the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to force action to uphold the human rights of people with learning disabilities and/or autism. This is due to the repeated failure to move people out of secure hospitals into more appropriate accommodation. 

We have long-standing concerns about the human rights of more than 2,000 people with learning disabilities and/or autism who are currently detained, often far away from home and for many years. 

We have now sent a pre-action letter to Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Health & Social Care, arguing that the Department of Health & Social Care has failed in its obligations to protect human rights by repeatedly missing its own targets to address this issue. We expect the Department to respond by 17th March.

We welcome the Government’s commitment to re-introduce the Domestic Abuse Bill to Parliament as soon as possible. This is a much-needed piece of legislation and we welcome the government’s intention that the Bill should be a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to transform the response to domestic abuse.  However, in order to fulfil this transformative potential, significant improvements to the Bill are needed.  

We are calling for the Bill to:

• Ensure equal protection and support for all survivors, including those with insecure immigration status.
• Ensure a full range of specialist services are properly funded and provided for all survivors.
• Remove barriers to justice in civil and family matters, including through extension of new provisions for special measures to the family and civil courts and a strengthening and extension of the prohibition against cross-examination in person by an alleged perpetrator.

The Domestic Abuse Bill fell when Parliament was dissolved for the election last year, and is shortly due to be reintroduced. Our briefing, produced for the second reading of the previous version of the Bill, is available here: