Educational pathways and outcomes for children who are looked after: a population-scale data linkage study
End of project summary
Main Messages
Our research challenges the notion that educational attainment can be ascertained to simple characteristics of care such as short-term vs. long-term, or foster care vs. kinship care. Children in Wales often have more nuanced experiences than what is currently understood in quantitative data research in Wales, but also internationally.
Our research outlines that there are many factors that shape care-experiences, which have associations with educational attainment over 16 years of life. Even as early has KS1 where children are aged 7 years there is already a disparity of educational attainment. Our research showed that children who were care-experienced had KS1 proportions of attainment between 40 – 66% - compared to the general population proportion of 80%. We note, that foster care had both the lowest and one of the highest attainment levels – and the key factor that led to a lower attainment proportion was entering foster care right before primary school. In addition, children who were adopted met the expected levels of education at KS1, suggesting adoption is a protective care-experience in the early years. However, we found that children are not reaching their potential at KS2, as pass-levels were between 36 – 60% on average, compared to the 80% in the general population, which is inclusive of adopted children.
In terms of explanator variables and “what works”, we find that the children who enter care and return home in the early years are at risk for deprivation, school moves and exclusion/suspensions – suggesting that behavioural problems and instability are on-going and need intervention. We note that our data has a small sample size but does allow for longitudinal follow-up over 16 years. The methods used are all based on probability methods and are not transferable to other contexts nor are causal – they are Welsh specific for those born 2000 – 2003. From these findings, we reveal that children who have been in care are often not reaching their educational potential, and further research needs to explore the contribution of pre-intervention factors which could further explain this, i.e. abuse or neglect, along with continual support for children who return to their birth parents. Research and policymakers should be aware of how the care-experience is much more complicated than simplistic cut-offs and note the complexity of the care-experience in providing support.