Education Outcomes for Looked After Children 2023/24

Introduction

Looked after children are defined as those in the care of their local authority (Children Scotland Act 1995). Getting It Right For Every Child (GIRFEC) covers a range of policies aimed at helping every child and young person in Scotland reach their full potential, including looked after children, as they grow and develop into successful learners. Scottish Government, Education Scotland and local government are working together to improve the educational outcomes of looked after children and young people as part of The Promise. The aim is to improve the experience, achievement, engagement in learning and attainment of those who have been looked after and support their transition from education.

The Scottish Attainment Challenge aims to drive improved outcomes for children and young people, empowering headteachers and local authorities to take approaches that best suit the needs of their most disadvantaged children and young people.

An Official Statistics Publication for Scotland

These statistics are official statistics. Official statistics are statistics that are produced by crown bodies, those acting on behalf of crown bodies, or those specified in statutory orders, as defined in the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007.

Scottish Government statistics are regulated by the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR). OSR sets the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics that all producers of official statistics should adhere to.

More information about Scottish Government statistics is available on the Scottish Government website.

This report contains further development to statistics on the educational outcomes of previously looked after children, previously published as Official Statistics in Development. In reports for each of the last two years, new statistics were included to improve our understanding of educational outcomes for children who were looked after earlier in their school journey. Following engagement with users, changes to the coverage of these statistics have been introduced this year, and a series of longer-term developments agreed. Please see the background notes section for details of user feedback and planned development areas.

In this year’s report, we have included statistics for school leavers who were:

• Most recently looked after in the last year
• Most recently looked after for some duration after turning 12 years old, but not in the last year
• Most recently looked after between ages 5 and 12

These categories are mutually exclusive, and are based on each child’s most recent episode of care. Analysing the statistics in this way allows us to explore the educational outcomes for children who have been looked after, according to how recently they were looked after. This differs from statistics included in each of the two previous iterations of this report, where a child could be included in more than one of these groups. Therefore, except for children looked after in the last year, the statistics are not comparable with those published last year. Time series are only shown in this report where the data are comparable over time.

Throughout this report we will refer to children who were looked after at some point during the period 1 August 2023 to 31 July 2024, for any duration of time, as pupils or school leavers looked after within the year. Children who were not looked after within the year, but who were looked after for some duration in earlier years, will be referred to as: pupils most recently looked after since turning 12; and pupils most recently looked after between age 5 and 12. Figure 1 illustrates how these categories map to school stages for each child’s most recent episode of care, depending on whether they left school in S4 (top bars), S5 (middle bars), or S6 (bottom bars). Statistics for ‘all pupils’ include children who have been looked after at any point.

Attendance and Achievement of Curriculum for Excellence Levels Statistics are provided only for children who were looked after in the last year (and all pupils). This follows feedback on the additional complexity of interpreting these statistics for younger children who were looked after only at earlier stages of school, given the variation in the time that has passed since turning those ages.

More information is given in the methodology section of the background notes.

Figure 1: Age and school stage of looked after school leavers included in these statistics, according to their latest episode of care and stage at which they left school.

Overview

The first section of this publication covers school attendance, including attendance data for 9,947 children looked after during the year. School exclusions statistics are not included in this publication as the data are collected and published biennially. The latest statistics on school exclusions of looked after children can be found in the 2022/23 publication.

The second  section focuses on the achievement of Curriculum for Excellence levels (CfE). This covers 2,070 children who were looked after at some point during 2023/24, and for the 383 children in special schools/units who were looked after during the year.

The final two sections of this publication cover stages and attainment, and post-school destinations of young people who left school in 2023/24. An estimated 1,047 children who left school in 2023/24 had been looked after at some point between 1 August 2023 and 31 July 2024. They represent 1.9% of all 55,988 school leavers in 2023/24. During 2023/24, there were an additional 400 school leavers most recently looked after since they had turned 12 years old, and a further 624 children who were most recently looked after between the ages of 5 and 12.