Care Experienced Children and Young People funding: national operational guidance 2026/2027
Guidance to support local authorities plan how they will most effectively spend their Care Experienced Children and Young People funding.
Resources
There is a package of national and local support available to assist local authorities in planning how to use their Care Experienced Children and Young People Funding.
Education Scotland is refocusing its work and the way it works to align with the wider aspirations of educational reform. With its focus on the curriculum, it will continue to promote approaches to improvement, helping educators to achieve equity through the curriculum. As the refocused Education Scotland develops it will provide guidance on the support it can offer to assist local authorities in using Care Experienced Children and Young People Funding.
Local authorities may wish to consider the guidance produced by the Centre for Excellence for Children’s Care and Protection (CELCIS), Looked After and Learning, in developing their plans. These cover seven distinct areas: commitment to the designated manager role, support for teachers, promoting resilience and positive attachments, planning for education, developing engagement between schools, parents and carers, inclusive and relational approaches to education, and planning for improvement.
The Education Scotland website is a platform developed by Education Scotland that provides information and support that enables practitioners to improve their practice and increase the quality of learners’ experiences and outcomes. It provides access to: self-evaluation and improvement frameworks, research, teaching and assessment resources, exemplars of practice and support for on-line collaboration and networks through Glow. This will be a helpful resource for considerations relating to allocation of this funding. The section on corporate parenting contains an extensive suite of links and resources with specific relevance to this funding stream. Education Scotland have also developed Scotland’s Equity Toolkit: supporting recovery and accelerating progress which has been designed as a learning resource which will be informed and updated as evidence, research and effective practice emerges.
The Scottish Attainment Challenge Self-evaluation resource is designed to assist schools and others bring about further improvement.
NHS Education for Scotland (NES) lead on the National Trauma Transformation Programme (NTTP). NES contribute to the development of a wide range of learning resources, guidance and implementation support for all sectors of the workforce, including leaders, to up-skill staff to the appropriate level of trauma-informed and responsive practice and, critically, to embed and sustain this model of working.
Intandem is Scotland’s mentoring programme for young people looked after at home, launched in November 2016. It is funded by Scottish Government and delivered by Inspiring Scotland. Intandem provides mentors for young people aged between 8-14 years who are looked after by their local authority but living at home. Intandem and Inspiring Scotland can provide a range of support across a range of activities including recruitment, training, safeguarding, and evaluation as well as capacity building and organisational support.
A comprehensive evaluation has been ongoing since the start of the Scottish Attainment Challenge programme in 2015, to provide evidence and learning about the overall implementation of the Attainment Scotland Funding to enable assessment of progress towards its long-term outcomes. The Attainment Scotland Fund (ASF) Evaluation Summative report, published in March 2026, brings together both quantitative and qualitative evidence to report on progress towards the short, medium and long term outcomes of the Scottish Attainment Challenge.
Additional support and resources are provided by a range of national, local and third sector organisations which can provide support for vulnerable young people and their families. These include organisations such as MCR Pathways, whose mentoring programme is making a significant positive impact on educational outcomes for care experienced young people in Glasgow and other areas of Scotland, and Includem, who are developing new services focused specifically on raising attainment, which will be beneficial in identifying and addressing barriers to attainment.
Some Local Authorities have established a Virtual School, Virtual Head Teacher or a Virtual Care Experienced Team. These teams and roles have a specific focus within their local authority to bring about improvements in the education of Looked After (Care Experienced) children and to promote their educational achievement as if they were in a single school. The school does not exist in real terms, or as a model but is an organisational tool which has been created for the effective co-ordination of support for this vulnerable group at a strategic and operational level.