Educational Attainment of Looked-After Children
We have with us the Minister for Children and Young People, Angela Constance MSP. I welcome her to the meeting, along with Jackie Brock and David Blair—thank you for attending this morning. I believe, minister, that you have an opening statement for us.
Yes, convener. I am grateful for the opportunity to make an opening statement. First, though, I thank the committee for inviting me along this morning. I am delighted to be here to discuss this very important agenda and to have the opportunity to set out the Government’s ambitions for our looked-after children and young people. We look forward to the conclusions of the committee’s inquiry and to assessing how we can work together, which I hope will be a springboard for further and continuous action in relation to our children.
As colleagues and members will be aware, the two core and inextricably linked aims of the education team in this term of Government are to raise the attainment and improve the life chances of Scotland’s children. At the heart of everything that we have to do as a Government is ensuring that we have happy, healthy children who reach their full potential, which is particularly important for our looked-after children.
We know that the educational attainment of looked-after children in care is poor. The latest statistics show that they are absent or excluded from school more often, leave school earlier with fewer qualifications and are less likely to go on to further or higher education or employment after school.
The challenges for looked-after children are varied and complex, and unique to each child. We know that what happens or fails to happen in the early years has a huge impact on an individual’s capacity for learning and attainment. We also know that a young person’s life chances are likely to be adversely impacted on by their experiences prior to and after their experience of care. Those are often the chaotic and destabilising influences that led to their being taken into care in the first place.
In broad terms, we are taking a three-part approach. First, we want to secure even earlier interventions, so that children who are at risk of coming into care are provided with support in their family environment to allow them to go on to lead positive lives without coming into care. Secondly, we need to promote the taking of early decisions about permanence, so that a child or young person is found a permanent, safe and nurturing home with the least additional disruption in their lives. Drift or delay in decision making is no longer acceptable. Thirdly, we will also continue to promote good corporate parenting, so that those who care for looked-after children and young people are the best substitute parents possible.
As corporate parents, we all have a duty to help to shape the lives of, and provide opportunities for, Scotland’s looked-after children and young people, ensuring that they are supported to achieve the same levels of success as their peers and that, when they leave care, they are able to lead fulfilling, happy and healthy lives.
Thank you, minister. I pay tribute to those who work on the front line. The evidence that we have received and the visit that we made yesterday have shown us some very committed and hard-working people who are doing their best for children who find themselves in these difficult circumstances. Their hard work and the effort that has gone in at both local authority and Government level over the past 10 years has been significant, but there has been only what might best be described as slow progress in improving the educational attainment of looked-after children, especially those who are looked after at home. In your view, why has that progress been so slow despite the genuine effort and commitment of all concerned?
I add my thanks to, and express my appreciation of, those who work on the front line with our most vulnerable children.
My reflections are that permanency is taking too long and multiple placements continue to be a significant problem. Children often leave care at a crucial time, during an exam period, and more absences from school and a higher number of exclusions go hand in hand with multiple placements. More work can be done to ensure that the children’s education is not seen in isolation; hence the importance of improving permanency for the children and early decision making. That must be one of the fundamentals, as the failure to do that is one of the reasons why progress has not been made more quickly.
More progress could be made on corporate parenting. I see an improvement in the understanding of corporate parenting, which was reflected in the recent parliamentary debate on permanence. In that debate, colleagues will have heard from MSPs who are or have been local government councillors. I remember speaking about corporate parenting 10 years ago, when I was a councillor, and I got some blank looks from around the council chamber. The situation has changed and there is now a greater appreciation at the local authority level of what corporate parenting means. We would all acknowledge that there is now a better focus on corporate parenting in health, but there are issues within that that we need to take forward. We are also aware that the undiagnosed health needs of looked-after children will have an adverse effect on their learning.
You touched on many different areas in your answer.
I apologise.
Not at all. Members will return to those areas as we go through our questions, but I will ask a couple of more specific questions about the policy and legislative landscape that we face.
One of the first things that struck me when we decided to look at this area was that there seemed to have been a lot of policies, guidance and effort over the past 10 years, which on the face of it looked pretty confusing—perhaps there were gaps and overlap. Is there a need to consolidate and clarify policy and legislation in the area of educational attainment for looked-after children?
I agree that considerable thought and effort is needed to disentangle certain elements of the policies that have emerged and been developed over the past 10 years, although policy has developed more recently. I am keen to get CELCIS—the centre for excellence for looked-after children in Scotland—to update the two most recent policy documents, “These Are Our Bairns: a guide for community planning partnerships on being a good corporate parent” and “Looked After Children and Young People: We Can and Must Do Better”
I am a bit reticent about having a large-scale rewriting project. I would much rather that we were doing things proactively and working with and supporting our partners on the things that will make a difference on the ground. Although I will listen to any arguments that are marshalled in this area, I hope that the work that CELCIS will do to update those policy documents will satisfy the committee.
Our legislative programme for children, including the children’s rights bill and, more significantly for looked-after children, the children’s services bill, will give us opportunities to ensure that we have a more cohesive, simple and up-to-date approach.
I was not suggesting that you should rewrite on a large scale, but given that a lot of effort has gone into all the guidance and legislation over the past 10 years—you mentioned two examples—how does the Government ensure that it is being implemented on the ground?
Two important strands of that work are CELCIS and the looked-after children strategic implementation group, or LACSIG. It is about going shoulder to shoulder with our partners at a local level because it is those partners who are responsible for the delivery of policy. The Government wants to ensure that we are driving change at a national level and that we get consistency throughout Scotland.
LACSIG has what we call activity hubs, one of which is on educational attainment for looked-after children. It is about leaders in the sector championing and taking forward substantial pieces of work. CELCIS is very much about spreading good practice and, as well as being a voice of authority, providing expert advice to local authorities.
Government has an important scrutiny and inspection role. We need to ensure that legislation and policy are actually implemented. Another opportunity for us to fulfil our role is when we report to Parliament, as we will do in February on the additional support for learning legislation. A wide variety of means is open to the Government. It is not always an easy task to ensure that what we legislate for actually happens on the ground, but we seek continuous improvement in that and other matters.
I asked that question because, in relation to implementation, co-ordination, co-operation and a number of other areas, one of the most-used phrases in evidence—it certainly stuck in my mind—was, “It’s patchy.” The word patchy has come through from a number of witnesses. How will the Government ensure that we avoid that patchiness?
10:15
Our big platforms in that regard will be the early years framework and the getting it right for every child approach. Despite the fact that we are a small country, there are different outcomes for children in different parts of the country. It is not for Government to micromanage local government or health boards, and they all do things differently. Often, there are sensible and pragmatic reasons for that—the needs of the city centre of Glasgow are different from those of the rural Highlands. However, we need to ensure more consistent outcomes for children. As I said, GIRFEC and the early years framework are the platforms for that. That was the main driver for our legislative programme and the children’s services bill.
The committee has been struck by the grotesque statistics in relation to children who are looked after at home. Yesterday, the committee saw evidence in Glasgow that challenging behaviours are not associated only with those children who are looked after at home or elsewhere but, nevertheless, that category has proved to be the most challenging in supporting better attainment.
In evidence, the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland suggested that, when children are in local authority residential care or with foster carers, it is easier for schools to build links. A theme that we keep coming back to is the difficulty of ensuring that the home environment is supportive of what is happening in school.
What can social work and education staff do to help support parents in the education of their children? I acknowledge what you said about not micromanaging local authorities, but what might the Government’s role be?
That is an important area. It is also a huge area, but I will do my best to answer as concisely as I can.
It goes without saying that some parents of children who are looked after at home will be particularly challenging to work with. It also goes without saying that some parents of children who are looked after at home would welcome support to help them become more involved in their children’s education.
In broad terms, I am interested in the arena of parental involvement and I am pursuing the issue in relation to all parents. CELCIS is going to conduct a baseline study of children who are looked after at home, and LACSIG is also taking a particular interest in that group of children.
The work that we want to do on parental involvement is particularly important for children who are looked after at home. It ties in with a lot of the work that we want to do on the early years and early intervention. We must remember that many parents will have had a negative experience of education. Front-line staff will therefore sometimes have to make considerable efforts to make the school or nursery a welcoming place for parents.
We have to listen to parents. They have a right to be informed. If a parent is involved in the life of the child, whether or not that child is at home with them, we should give them information about their child’s learning and about how they can best support it. That is not always apparent to all parents.
The committee will be aware that the Government is committed to a national parenting strategy. A lot of that work is about supporting all parents, not only parents of failing families. Reaching out to harder-to-reach parents is often best done through either the voluntary sector or non-stigmatising services—universal services that are for all parents and all children.
That is a brief overview—I am happy to expand on any aspect of the issue.
It is interesting that your comments reflect a little what we saw in practice yesterday, particularly in the Place2Be initiative, which brings in support from the voluntary sector and has made a conspicuous effort to involve parents as well as children.
Some of the family backgrounds that were described to us in the schools that we visited were utterly chaotic. It was not immediately obvious why a more interventionist approach was not being taken or, in many instances, why children were not taken out of that environment at an earlier stage. I suspect that that probably speaks to the point that you made about speeding up decision making where possible and removing the disruption caused by multiple different placements.
There are two issues. We have to accept and endorse the fact that schools are very different places from what they used to be. We have to accept that difference is the norm in our schools, whether it involves looked-after children or children with disabilities, and that part of the core task of anybody in the front line of a universal service such as education is to engage with all parents. I am not diminishing the fact that that is not without its challenges.
I take very seriously the issue of speeding up decisions about children. CELCIS will become increasingly important as it is doing a number of strands of work, and we need to have sharper and more focused parental capacity assessments. Removing a child from their birth family must always be a last resort, because what we know about attachment theory indicates that, unless there are overwhelming reasons to do that, we can do more damage by removing a child than not. However, when we need to remove a child, we need to reach the conclusion to do so far more quickly, so parental capacity assessments are important.
One-system approaches should be adopted whereby decision making about children is informed by the needs of children and not the bureaucracy or the system. We know a lot about attachment, brain development and child development; it is about the age and stage of a child, not always their chronological age.
I cannot emphasise enough the importance of the early years. We must make a radical shift into supporting parents earlier, particularly from pre-birth up to when the child is three. There is now more of a focus on that age group, on early years and on early intervention than there has been. That is the key to unlocking many of the difficulties in and around children who have poor life chances and whose educational attainment is lower than we may desire.
Liam McArthur mentioned the visit that we went on yesterday. It was striking that in both primary schools the percentage of looked-after children is quite small but the number of children who need additional support and who have complicated and disruptive home lives is quite high.
It seemed that the children who are looked after became looked after through a reference to the children’s panel, which was often related to school absence, and that once they became looked after, they had an assigned social worker. Are you confident that the children who should be classified as looked after are classified as such? The involvement of a social worker seems to be the important factor that goes along with looked-after status.
The fact that more children are looked after and that children are coming into care younger is evidence that we are identifying needs better and earlier. I do not know that there is an issue with the length of time that children spend in care and what happens thereafter.
In addition, children come in and out of care—
I am sorry, minister. Most of the children that I am talking about are looked after at home. They still live with their parents, but they have social worker involvement because of their looked-after status.
It is still true that children can come in and out of care. That is why under our broader agenda for children, which involves our curriculum for excellence and additional support for learning platforms, local authorities have clear responsibilities for identifying, assessing and supporting additional needs for children.
We are identifying children who are at risk, regardless of whether they live at home, but there is still a job to do when it comes to meeting better the needs of individual children, whether they are looked after or not.
I will push you a little on what we all understand is a difficult and sensitive area. I know that you said that it should be a last resort to remove a child from their home. Although, instinctively, we would all agree with that, should it be the last resort? I am sure that you would agree that it is not a risk-free option to leave a child in a chaotic home. The outcomes for that child, not just in educational attainment but more widely, could be severely disrupted and damaged as a result of a decision not being taken to remove them from that environment.
The reality is that there is no risk-free option. Removing a child from their family and putting them into care has a cost, which is why I am keen that we get sharper, better and more thorough parental capacity assessments done more quickly and that we have a sharper focus on risk assessment. We are pursuing that work in the context of child protection.
We must be acutely aware that children get only one childhood, so it is imperative that we all act quickly. I am on record as saying in Parliament that the needs of the child are paramount. That must be our guiding principle and our guiding light: our decisions should always be about what is in the best interest of the child. For some children, that will mean their being removed from their families, and in those cases we need to find them a permanent suitable family quickly.
We need robust planning—we need to have robust plans for children. I am aware that in evidence CELSIS said that, although most children have a plan, there are still issues around the quality of those plans, which do not always take a long-term view. We must have long-term views and aspirations for our looked-after children, just as we would for our own children. The plans must be linked to outcomes. Education has to feature strongly and prominently in those plans for children.
10:30
Good morning, minister, and thank you for your introductory remarks.
I want to ask about joint working. The committee has heard in evidence that mismatches often seem to arise between the different agencies. What action can we take to ensure that the agencies involved in additional support for learning and GIRFEC are geared up? We have the policies and the will, and we acknowledge the problems, but barriers remain. Do we know what the barriers are, and what action can be taken to get over them?
I agree that awareness of the idea of corporate parenting and of the needs of looked-after children is increasing among local authorities and the Government, but do leadership issues arise? The subject is sensitive, but the outcomes will be dramatic if we get things right.
Things have not been working for a long time. We have taken some action, but no evidence exists to show that the action has worked. People feel that our policies and agreements are right but that they do not work in practice.
Many of the issues are cultural, and we depend on people working and talking together and sharing information when appropriate. The children’s services bill is in our legislative programme, and as part of the consultation, we are asking people what helps and what hinders joint working and the sharing of best practice. We need to know that and to encapsulate the ideas.
Where GIRFEC has been implemented and pursued with vigour, the results are better. In Highland, each child has only one plan. It is an integrated plan, not one in which several reports by several professionals are just stapled together. Highland has well-integrated multi-agency plans, which build on what has been done to implement GIRFEC. However, the implementation of GIRFEC is not uniform across Scotland. Different areas are at different stages, which is why we want to put GIRFEC on a legislative footing.
Many examples of good leadership exist in various parts of the Government and the public sector. We need to have an ethos of continuous improvement. There is no room for resting on our laurels; we should always be striving to do more.
Is any of the work threatened by changes in local authorities’ budgets?
I will choose my words carefully here: if the current position in public finances has a silver lining, it is that integrated early intervention and preventative work will be pushed forward. We can no longer afford not to do those things.
I have a supplementary question on joint working. I was quite shocked when some of the oral evidence to the committee suggested that one barrier to joint working is different computer systems operating in different local authorities and within different departments of the same local authority. It makes it difficult to share information. I am surprised that we have not managed to deal with what seems to be a fairly straightforward and obvious barrier. Can central Government do anything to overcome that?
As a former front-line worker, I know that anything to do with technology is never straightforward and obvious. I appreciate people’s frustrations about that. The Government is working to try to resolve some of those issues.
Communication and joint working depend on people being willing to walk down the corridor and speak to each other in the same way as they depend on people sending e-mails to each other, picking up the phone and going to meetings. Some technological advances and solutions can undoubtedly make a lot of administration and communication easier, but it ultimately boils down to people.
Initial professional training, whether it be for teachers or social workers, is crucial. Any professional who works with children has to accept that they have to work with other professionals and be able to resolve thorny issues about information sharing. That is one of the reasons why we are looking at putting clear duties on information sharing into the planned children’s services bill.
David Blair or Jackie Brock might have something to say about e-care and the technology that we are working on.
David Blair (Scottish Government)
Not that long ago, we held an event with directors of education to consider issues related to looked-after children, and at that event someone offered some good practice that they had developed. There are a number of good initiatives around the country. For example, SEEMiS is a computer system that allows care plans and educational plans to be integrated in one place. It is an elegant and user-friendly system that can be accessed from different computers in different parts of the country. It is still going through some development, and a number of local authorities have sought to adopt it.
Rather than seek to impose that sort of thing, we seek to encourage it. We hold events so that people can share good practice and showcase what is going on. There are certainly solutions to the problem that Joan McAlpine has identified.
Minister, I want to ask about resources, which we know are hard to come by at the moment. My colleague, Claire Baker, highlighted the fact that a lot of the children that the members saw on their visit yesterday are not actually looked after. There are three levels: looked after in care, looked after at home and, more worryingly, those who are on the threshold of being looked after. That is a real resource issue.
Last week, I told the committee that there are 707 looked-after children in Dundee city. I have checked the figure since, and it is now 708. Dundee City Council is currently reviewing its budgets. It has overspent on children’s services, so it is diverting hundreds of thousands of pounds into children’s services to manage the 708 children in the system. Yesterday’s visit highlighted the fact that so many children are on the threshold of falling into the category of being looked after. Given our hard-pressed budgets and the council tax freeze, how can we properly support children who are on the threshold?
Also, you made a point about early work and crisis care. Those 708 children have to be dealt with at the crisis end rather than at the preventative end of the scale. Where will the money come from to be diverted back into prevention in the early years?
That is one reason why we have spoken about a shift towards early intervention and prevention. The reality is that there are older children who have very high needs, so we cannot remove the carpet from under their feet, so to speak.
There are two strands to Ms Marra’s question. I will address her point about children currently on the threshold, but we need to be radical by thinking about upstream early intervention. I will give the committee two concrete examples, one of which is from Dundee.
If we do not act until children are on the threshold of being taken into care, that is a missed opportunity. We should act much earlier. The family nurse partnership involves intensive home visiting whereby the nurse develops a productive, close and supportive relationship with the mother from pre-birth onwards. That is one of the few programmes that have been proved to prevent maltreatment of children.
I am also aware of a project in Dundee called the new beginnings service, which works with soon-to-be parents and mothers who have mental health problems, substance misuse problems or learning difficulties. Good early intervention work is going on to enable parents to turn their lives around.
I accept what Ms Marra says about the need to support and help children who are on the threshold, but we need to act much earlier rather than wait until children are on the threshold. The project in Dundee is to the credit of Dundee City Council, because despite being under extreme financial pressure it accepts that it has an obligation to assess the needs of children and provide for them, irrespective of its budget. I do not diminish the challenge for the council to put in extra resource, and it is to its credit that it is doing that.
I want to follow up on the issue of resource. I am sure that you are more aware than any of us of the pressing need for such resource in areas of deprivation such as Dundee and Glasgow. The Government has mooted the interesting idea of areas that are most affected by flooding coming together to pool flood prevention funding. Would you support the idea of areas of high deprivation pooling early years funding, which is such a priority for those areas?
The biggest challenge in tackling deprivation and intervening early is to raise the bar across the country. I draw attention to the work in Falkirk that involves implementing GIRFEC and being serious about early intervention while generating savings that can be used for other interventions for children in need. Falkirk was able to evidence £1 million in savings in that regard. I ask David Blair to say something about strategic commissioning, because that may get more to the nub of your question.
The Government has been aware of the resource issue for a while, because the economic crisis has not happened suddenly. The Public Audit Committee looked last year at residential care, and similar challenges were raised about how we get more for less. Part of the response to that came from the national residential child care initiative and the idea of strategic commissioning.
Strategic commissioning is an intelligent form of procurement whereby you look at your medium-term need across all types of care and you reverse-engineer your services in partnership with third sector and local authority services. There is early evidence that suggests that, by doing that, you can achieve what you are trying to achieve and improve outcomes because you are looking at the process from the child’s perspective and working backwards to define your services. You can do that with a constrained budget, too.
10:45
Through LACSIG and the commissioning activity work, a lot of work is being done to raise awareness among local authorities of strategic commissioning. We are starting from quite a low point of knowledge and awareness of the process at a local authority level, but it is a valuable tool.
The other thing that is relevant to this area is a report that was produced in 2009—I think—by the former chief executive of the Social Work Inspection Agency. It considered the correlation between local authority spend and outcomes. What is illuminating is that there was a poor correlation between the amount of money that was spent and the outcomes that were achieved. The key factors that drove performance delivery related to local leadership—it was a matter of having the tools, resources and ability locally to make clear decisions based on a rational argument for doing X over Y.
Those are the most pertinent points. Pooling budgets is one option, but all that that does is create a bigger pool of money. It does not necessarily lead to better outcomes by itself.
I will ask about school support for looked-after children. Earlier, the minister talked about the importance of school attendance. We see an increase in exclusions for looked-after children, and the committee has heard evidence about how that impacts on their educational attainment. To what extent do you think that Scottish Government guidance on attendance and exclusions is being followed?
One of the schools that we visited yesterday has made dramatic improvements in the space of three years. In the initial year, it had a real problem with exclusions, but it has managed to turn that situation around. I am not convinced that it is Government guidance that is making the improvements happen; I think that it is the action that is taken by schools. What is your view on how we tackle the problem?
The fact is that exclusions are down overall, as well as exclusions of looked-after children. Of course, the figures vary depending on whether you are talking about children who are looked after at home, in foster care or in local authority care, and there remains a gap between looked-after children and non-looked-after children in terms of exclusions.
The direction of travel shows that the guidance is being implemented. You are right to note that good practice at the local level is absolutely responsible for that, but we need to continue to support and encourage that good practice and to share it. That is where LACSIG and CELCIS have an important role to play. The Government’s positive behaviour team is also important in that regard. It works with probationers and local authorities in terms of their policy frameworks and the delivery of training and expertise on issues such as solution-focused approaches, nurturing and problem solving. Jackie Brock can say a bit more about that.
Jackie Brock (Scottish Government)
The positive behaviour team is based in Education Scotland. The Government has done a good job of providing a guidance framework, as I hope is demonstrated by the one-third drop over the past four years in the exclusion of children who are looked after as well as children who are not looked after. As the minister said, that guidance is backed up, crucially, by the positive behaviour team.
We would like you to consider the issues around curriculum for excellence, which has at its heart the notion of schools and teachers having a responsibility for the health and wellbeing of every pupil. We take that approach not only because it sounds like a good thing to do but because it is backed up by international evidence that shows that a whole-school approach that is characterised by positive relationships between pupils and teachers, respect for pupils and ambition for pupils is effective.
We are lucky to have, in curriculum for excellence, the only set in Europe of principles on responsibility for the health and wellbeing of children. We are trying, at a strategic level, to put those pieces of the jigsaw together around our aspirations for our schools, because that approach works for every child. You are undoubtedly right about what more is needed at school level, and mention has been made of the positive behaviour team in that regard.
In thinking about how GIRFEC works at early years level, primary school level and secondary school level, we can see that we need a variety of ways of working with young people to ensure that we do so effectively. The GIRFEC guidance might well need a bit of refocusing, if you like—that reflects what the minister has said about wanting to update the suite of guidelines that are already in place, based on the good practice that we have seen to date.
We have heard some evidence about the use of part-time curriculums. They might be a solution for some young people, but concern has been expressed that they do not benefit from that approach. Do you have any views on their use?
My overriding view is that we have one curriculum for a reason, which is that we have to provide the same opportunities to all our children. I am glad that the development of curriculum for excellence has resulted in the same curriculum in terms of the outcomes and opportunities that we work towards for all our children, despite the fact that different children have different needs and require different levels of support. In the senior phase of the curriculum for excellence in particular—although not exclusively—the curriculum and learning do not have to be delivered solely in schools. For many children that is both positive and important.
We have clear guidance and expectations. For children in primary schools, the curriculum is 25 hours; for secondary school children, it is 27 hours—Jackie Brock can correct me if I have got that wrong. That has to be what we provide to all children. For children who have been excluded, we have a period of three days in which to get alternative plans in place. At times, there might be reasons to go for the build-up approach to getting children back into school, but we need to work on the basis that we are trying to deliver a full curriculum experience to all our children. We should not have narrow, diminutive aspirations for our children, irrespective of their complexities.
Another subject that has come through strongly in evidence is the importance of relationships and the presence in school of an individual whom the child can trust. The Place2Be project, which has already been mentioned, was running in one of the schools that we visited yesterday. It is to the credit of the other school, which does not have that service, that it still had lots of innovative practices and involvement with parents and teachers. Deputies took responsibility for looked-after children, although they recognised that having an additional service such as the Place2Be project would be advantageous.
The project is being piloted at the moment. Are you confident that the resources are available to roll out that kind of service, which is really an in-school counselling service? Do you also recognise the need for such a service for all children in school, and not just those who are characterised as looked after?
You made a point about relationships and resources. In relation to the “Extraordinary Lives” report, it struck me that the one thing that we need to extrapolate and develop further is the need to have an individual, perhaps a teacher, who can show that they care and take an interest in the child. Designating school managers works well, but they might be responsible for many looked-after children, depending on how many are in the school or the year, and on the size of the school.
I am attracted to the idea of there being a specific named person in school for a looked-after child. Some local authorities use that approach well. There is, perhaps, an argument for all children to have a named person in school. I am a former social worker, so forgive me for using the analogy of a key worker, but such a one-to-one relationship is often what is needed to enable services to go the extra mile to support a child.
I am keen to ensure that our most vulnerable children and our looked-after children get what they are entitled to from the universal resource. Despite the climate that we are in, our universal resource, whether in relation to health or education spend on children, is still phenomenal. We continue to spend a huge amount of money on universal services for children and we must ensure that the ways in which we deliver that universal spend mean that our looked-after children in particular get what they are entitled to.
I am absolutely clear that supporting our looked-after children is not a peripheral project; it must be at the core of everything that we do. Some children have additional support needs and require more targeted support, but if we use and deliver our universal services correctly, we will be able to meet those additional needs and provide more specific, targeted services.
Three people want to come in on this subject. I will let them in only if the questions and answers are quick.
I will take you back to Claire Baker’s question on exclusions, minister. Yesterday, we saw a school that, in the somewhat challenging, chaotic aftermath of a merger of multiple primary schools, had a very high exclusion rate. The number of exclusions had come down dramatically but, in some of the classes where there was a high proportion of looked-after children and a high incidence of challenging behaviour, children were affected by those who had previously been excluded.
How do we maintain the opportunities for the other children in classes in which exclusions have come down dramatically, if the challenging behaviours that have a knock-on effect on other children in the class and the wider school have not necessarily been removed? Are you confident that the guidance on reducing exclusion, which we all support, will not lead to the behaviour of children who were previously excluded having a knock-on effect on the wellbeing of other children in the school?
In a nutshell, that is about the whole-school approach to positive behaviour and relationships.
That is probably as quick an answer as I can give. I ask Jackie Brock whether there is anything more specific that it would be appropriate to highlight.
We should remember the various drivers that there are in secondary and, to a certain extent, primary school. The leadership of the school will balance the absolute priority to look after each child with the need to think about attainment issues for every child, such as whether standards are being raised and what the impact will be if there are young people who are disruptive.
As Ms Baker said, the clue is in relationships. International evidence backs the assertion that inclusivity is working. Schools will be mindful of ensuring that they have classes that work and that the relationships within them are good. It would be bizarre if a dramatic reduction in exclusions had been achieved in a school at a cost to the wider school community. We would hope that that inclusive approach would benefit every child.
The clear message from the pastoral care teachers at a school that we visited yesterday was that looked-after children were not attaining because they did not attend school. They said that those children would attain if they were there, but that there was not a great deal that they could do if they were not there.
The teacher who looked after, I think, fourth-year children told us that she could identify in their first year the kids who were going to have problems. She had followed them through and worked really hard to get them to come into school, but the tools at her disposal were limited. Often, unless the children were physically at risk, it was difficult for social workers to make them a priority. Even when she managed to get them categorised as looked after, they often did not have a named social worker. She said that the tools at her disposal to get them to attend school were often punitive—she had to go down the warrant road, which damages the relationship between the school and the child. There seems to be a fundamental attendance problem that we need to address.
11:00
Absolutely. In many instances, getting looked-after children to school, particularly those who are looked after at home, will be the first very important step. That point is well made.
In terms of our wider agenda, it is crucial that we work better and earlier with parents to ensure that they get the right support at the right time. The parenting agenda is at the heart of the work of the early years task force and the change fund. Much of that is pitched at all parents, but it is also the best way to reach harder-to-reach parents.
The hardest and most important job anybody will have is being a parent and we need to do much more to support parents. That is why we are committed to a national parenting strategy, but while that is being developed I assure the committee that we absolutely will not stop doing things to support parenting and take the parenting agenda forward. We need to work collaboratively and inclusively with parents and, at times, be clear with parents and carers as to what their responsibilities are.
We took evidence earlier from directors of education and social work about the additional support for learning legislation. They suggested that, despite being fairly new legislation, it was not fitting in with the GIRFEC approach in the way they expected, that overenthusiastic parents were using it and that it was not delivering for a lot of areas
You mentioned health issues not being diagnosed for looked-after children. If the ASL legislation is settling down in that way and a child who is on the threshold of being looked after is not getting advocacy from their parent or carers, what steps are you taking to monitor the implementation of the legislation and to ensure that the needs of looked-after children are being met?
I am always a bit disappointed when I hear parents being labelled. Sometimes when parents are striving for the rights of their child, they are unnecessarily labelled as difficult because they are an inconvenience to services. In any group of people there are always difficult folk, but I am not sure that that should be the premise of our approach to parents.
Notwithstanding that, I am very aware that for a parent of a child with additional needs, it takes considerable energy to exercise their rights to refer the case to a tribunal if they feel that the local authority is not fulfilling its duties to them as a parent or to their child. That is in addition to the energy that they already spend on caring for a child with additional needs. In that sense, I entirely accept that we need to build on the synergy of GIRFEC and the additional support for learning legislation, which was strengthened comparatively recently. We will report to Parliament in February on the things that we have an obligation to report on under the ASL legislation; looked-after children will be a feature of that report, which will help us better to meet the additional support needs of looked-after children.
Thank you. We have three areas on which we would like to get your views on the record, minister, if possible. I am aware of the time, but if members are speedy and responses brief we should get through them.
Minister, it has been put to us that there is patchy good practice when it comes to the awareness of the professionals who are involved in care of what other people are doing. What discussions have you had with bodies such as CELCIS and the General Teaching Council for Scotland to try to improve that?
We have on-going discussions with those bodies. We certainly have a close working relationship with CELCIS, and the Government funds the corporate parenting national training programme. I have not been involved in any discussions with the GTCS, but it is an important partner in taking forward Donaldson’s work. Donaldson reflected a lot on the need to improve initial teacher training to equip teachers better to deal with other professionals and the many and varied needs of children who are catered and cared for.
Does Jackie Brock want to add anything specific to that?
The General Teaching Council for Scotland is on the curriculum for excellence management board and it actively takes part in work on advice and guidance in relation to all responsibilities in the system, including health and wellbeing and the delivery of the ASL legislation.
The Donaldson review suggests quite major changes to the teacher training structure. What reaction has the Government received to that so far? Donaldson recommended that the structure must be much more integrated and cross-curricular. Have you had time to reflect on that?
Yes. A national partnership group is taking forward Donaldson’s recommendations, and the GTCS and the teacher unions are represented on it.
Is there a specific focus on people who need special attention in schools?
Absolutely. That is a core part of the curriculum, and delivering it is part of the recommendations.
What is the timescale for that group to report back?
It has just met. I can get back to the committee with the specific milestones.
I would be interested to know about them. Thank you.
I am happy to provide that information.
On a different but related matter, I met Dyslexia Scotland with the deans of initial teacher education institutes. There is a great appetite for Donaldson and doing things differently in initial teacher education.
On a similar point, I am sure that other committee members have also received correspondence on the effectiveness of the training regime and the ability of teachers to identify problems. An issue that has come to my attention recently is teachers’ ability to identify children whose education has been impacted on by domestic abuse at home. I am sure that other members have had correspondence on that issue. I hope that the group that was mentioned is looking at a wide range of issues, including that one. Is that the case?
Absolutely. It is fair to say that a teacher will not be taught everything about every potential need of a child in initial teacher training. It is called initial teacher training for a very good reason. Continuous professional development is therefore important. CELCIS and LACSIG will have important roles in that respect, as they have a remit to work with all professionals who come into contact with looked-after children.
An issue that has been raised with us is the possibility that there is too narrow a focus on attainment and that, for many looked-after children, we should look at their broader achievements in overcoming all kinds of barriers. Which approach is better to focus on at this stage? What is the Scottish Government’s desire for the levels of attainment of looked-after children in the narrow sense?
We must have absolutely the same ambitions for our looked-after children as we have for all our children. We should not narrow down or limit our ambitions; rather, we should focus clearly on bringing the attainment levels of looked-after children up to levels that are on a par with those of non-looked-after children. We must not be short of ambition or vision for our looked-after children.
As for whether we measure attainment too narrowly, I point out that we only take a snapshot at S4 when a lot of the children in question are leaving care. There are all sorts of difficulties with that and, as a measurement, it is quite limited. There are arguments for measuring achievement more widely, but I think that that is true for all children.
Could the Government consider measuring attainment in a wider sense or differently? The inquiry has been predicated on the statistics for the educational attainment of looked-after children but yesterday it was pointed out to the group of members who visited primary schools that young people could be in care right through primary school and then come out of care, which would mean that they would not count as looked-after children in the statistics, while things could happen the other way round in secondary schools. If the underlying statistics are not reliable, how can we make our inquiries, how can the Government take adequate action and how can the local authorities respond adequately? Could that situation be reviewed?
We could look at that.
We are finding that local authorities, for example, are using increasingly sophisticated measures of attainment at S4 level and tracking reading, writing and other skills. We would like those measures to be broadened out, but at least the basics are there. There is also tracking between school catchment areas, while other local authorities focus on their bottom 20 per cent. All of that is proving to be positive in redirecting effort at school level towards improving performance for every child. The debate is certainly live and I am sure that the minister will want to come back to you on the matter.
Can you specify any local authorities we might contact for further information on such practices?
Fife would be one.
That is very helpful. Liam McArthur has a very brief supplementary.
I think that Jackie Brock picked up the point in her response. It has been raised with us that figures for attainment more generally do not necessarily give a real feel for what is happening in each education area or each school, but you seem to be saying that you are aware of that and that there might be a case for finding a different way of capturing the data. Is that right?
Yes.
Some of the legislation that will be introduced, including the children’s services bill and the children’s rights bill, has been mentioned. Can the minister give us a little flavour of how those will inform the Government’s strategy for moving forward with this area of work? Should looked-after children’s issues be kept separate from or incorporated into the work on the children’s services bill?
I am very keen for looked-after children to form part of our everyday business and not to be seen as a small group on the periphery. In our schools and indeed in any children’s service, we have to accept and work with the fact that difference is the norm. As far as our work on GIRFEC, curriculum for excellence, additional support for learning and so on is concerned, this is all about individualised support to individual children.
With regard to our overall strategy, I am very keen that with the children’s rights bill we as a Government start by setting a standard and placing on ourselves the expectation that we will lead by example in having regard to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. That will be done in advance of the children’s services bill to ensure that we can say that we have tried to put our own house in order before we seek improvements from our local government and health partners.
At this stage, there is no definitive list of what is in or out of the children’s services bill. In very broad terms, we want to update the Children (Scotland) Act 1995, which is now 16 years old, and put GIRFEC and the early years framework on a statutory footing. Forby that, our ears are open and we will listen to what those on the ground have to say about what works and what does not work.
I thank the minister, Jackie Brock and David Blair for their attendance and their instructive and helpful evidence.
I suspend briefly before we move on to the next item.
11:14
Meeting suspended.
11:18
On resuming—