School disruption for looked-after children is a significant issue that we see in the educational outcomes statistics for looked-after children. The statistics tell us that the more placements a looked-after child has in a school year, the less well they do across the indicators for attainment, attendance and exclusion compared with their peers. As Johann Lamont said, looked-after young people often have to change placements at short notice, and that can have an impact on their educational journeys. In an ideal world, such moves would be planned: schools and young people would be consulted in a planned way to enable young people to settle in their new placements. However, for care and protection reasons, that is not always possible.
Another issue for children who are looked after outwith their local authority area is that they often have delayed access to education due to concerns about provision for additional support needs. We do not have enough data about how many children are currently affected; we know that some local authorities have significantly high numbers of children who are looked after and that others have high numbers that they host, as it is termed. All those factors impact on children’s ability to engage with education.
We know, too, that children who have had to move placement and, consequently, to move school are at much higher risk of exclusion on admission. That means that they are admitted to a school but are subject to a tiered exclusion approach in which they might miss a particular subject because it is not offered on that curriculum, or they might be on a part-time timetable because they might have already covered a subject, or the school to which they move does not have appropriate additional support needs qualifications. It is an extremely complex issue for the young people with whom we work, but we see it reflected in the educational outcome indicators.
As we know, really robust planning for looked-after young people using the getting it right for every child principles, and involving the whole team around the child and incorporating the views of the child and the family, goes some way towards keeping moves to a minimum and ensuring that school moves are as unimpactful as possible. However, it is certainly an area to which we need to attend in order to ensure equity in access for children in such vulnerable situations.