The National Teaching & Advisory Service welcomes and supports the overall aims and objectives of the Government's Care Matters green paper (YPN, 25 April-1 May, p9). However, there are some fundamental issues not addressed.
The insistence of the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) that residential children's homes who claim to be providing education must register their own schools certainly makes sense administratively as it would stop looked-after children slipping through the net. It also ensures that their education is subject to an inspection regime.
However, we would suggest that this initiative will lead to lower expectations regarding educational standards for looked-after children. We believe that it also provides an impetus to place looked-after children in registered independent schools for children with behavioural difficulties, rather than promoting the need to pull out all the stops to get them into the types of education provision that good parents would wish for their own offspring.
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