Impact of living in care needs careful attention
Derren Hayes
Tuesday, December 8, 2015
Much has been written about the impact that budget reductions to government departments announced in last month's Spending Review will have for children's services over the next few years.
Although the exact amount given to councils is still to be decided, most are drawing up plans for how they can do more with less. With looked-after children being the largest area of children's services spending, many are considering how they can improve support to avoid care being necessary altogether.
However, research by the Rees Centre and Bristol University shows that far from damaging educational chances, the care system can in fact improve the outcomes for many vulnerable children, so this may put a different perspective on the issue. The study findings may come as a surprise to many politicians and mainstream commentators who revel in putting the boot into the care system at every available opportunity. But for those who work with vulnerable children and families, it provides confirmation that taking the tough decision to intervene can sometimes improve the child's life chances.
If ministers are prepared to heed the findings, the study could help change the ingrained narrative that care equals educational and life failure. It makes the crucial point that the way we measure educational attainment for children in care is set up to fail. Comparing the attainment of looked-after children with their non-care peers ignores the impact that the trauma of their previous experiences has on their wellbeing and ability to learn. When many of them struggle at school - GCSE A*-C pass rates for looked-after children are about half that of the general population - this "failure" is then assigned to the care system.
While the trauma that looked-after children deal with is down largely to family-related social problems, successive governments over the past decade must take their share of the blame for failing to get to the root causes of the attainment gap.
Instead of focusing on helping councils, schools and health services to develop intensive education support, too often the message has been that the care system is at fault for poor outcomes. Without doubt, standards of support vary across the country, but ministers who think the solution is to use adoption to take the state out of the equation are misguided.
What the latest research shows is that those in care often do better in education outcomes than those on the edge of care, while there are also distinct differences in attainment between fostered children and those in other forms of care. This data needs to be collected regularly through a more nuanced system of measuring looked-after children's progress. A solution put forward by children's services leaders recommends replacing the current comparisons with one that measures the attainment of those in different care settings. That would provide important evidence of what forms of care work best for certain children and lead to a more informed debate.
Having such data to hand might also help councils in the tough decisions they will need to make about how and when they use the care system to protect children and improve their life chances in the years ahead.
