Education (Looked-after Children)
The next item is a statement by Cathy Jamieson on the education of looked-after children. The minister will answer questions at the end of her statement, so there should be no interventions.
On 5 March last year, Jack McConnell wrote to each council leader in Scotland asking for a report on what their council was doing to improve educational services for looked-after children. He did so to ensure that the needs of those very vulnerable children were high up on the education agenda. The report, "Learning with Care: The Education of Children Looked After Away from Home by Local Authorities", published by the Executive's social work inspectorate last year, suggested that such children were not getting the best help to achieve their full potential. Today, I want to update Parliament about the progress that local authorities are making in meeting the report's recommendations.
Councils are the corporate parents of those very vulnerable children and are at the forefront of delivering services to meet their needs, but we all need to know what the picture is and we must all be involved in helping young people achieve all that they can.
Let us be quite clear about where we are starting from. There are around 11,300 looked-after children in Scotland, 8,100 of whom are of school age. Most of our looked-after children are educated in mainstream schools. English research suggests that only around 25 per cent of looked-after children will obtain educational qualifications. I have no reason to doubt that that is the pattern in Scotland. That figure should be contrasted with that for the total school population: 96 per cent of children leave school with qualifications. The statistics are chilling. They mean that vulnerable young people will not be qualified to access the employment and training opportunities that they seek. We can and must improve matters.
Every child of school age has a right to be provided with school education, and education authorities have a clear duty to ensure that all children are educated in a way that enables them to reach their full potential. Guidance to the Children (Scotland) Act 1995 makes it clear that looked-after children should have the same educational opportunities as other children. Where necessary, additional help, encouragement and support to address special needs or compensate for previous deprivation or disadvantage should be available.
That must be our aim. Looked-after children must have the same support and attention that we give our own children. That is not just a Government aim—all elected members to the Parliament or to local councils must have that aim. I encourage councillors to check what is happening on their doorsteps and to ensure that their councils champion the needs of the most vulnerable children. We must make a difference.
Before we consider the general local authority picture, it might help to remind ourselves of the "Learning with Care" report's main findings. Interviews were held with 21 children in five councils and the report did not provide comforting reading.
What does the report mean for the young people in question? Too few will attain basic school leaving qualifications in maths and English. Fewer still will move to further and higher education. Too many will feel excluded from society. As adults, they will not be in the best position to secure the employment and training opportunities that they dream about. We have not given those children the same start in life that we try to give our own children—that cannot be right.
We are not encouraging to the full the talents of potentially high achievers. Skills and talents that looked-after children might have in the academic field, in sport, in the arts or in developing their business acumen may be languishing. We all lose out through such waste.
The report made nine recommendations and councils were asked for information about their progress in implementing them. Today, I have placed a summary of the factual information that we received from councils in the Scottish Parliament information centre. The report contained tough messages and the responses show tough challenges ahead.
On the plus side, I am pleased to say that most local authorities are moving to meet the challenges. They recognise our shared agenda to improve matters. They have not shied away from revealing the full situation. There are examples of good practice, but the overall picture reveals wide variations in the performance of authorities. That suggests that the right basic frameworks are not yet in place throughout Scotland to give looked-after children a sound educational foundation.
Consideration of the "Learning with Care" report makes it clear that some minimum, non-negotiable standards and frameworks need to be in place. All looked-after children should receive full-time education and should have a care plan that adequately addresses educational needs. Since 1997, there has been a statutory obligation to draw up a care plan. All schools should have a teacher who is designated to champion the interests of looked-after children—the discipline task group also made that recommendation in its report, "Better Behaviour - Better Learning".
If such basic provisions are not in place, children cannot be educated; the level of attainment that is expected will not be clear to them, their carers or teachers; and schools and others will not be able to provide the right support at the right time to help children to make good progress.
None of those aims should need new resources and none is new. All are good practice. I recognise that implementing the "Learning with Care" report in full might take time, but I see no reason why all councils should not meet the three basic recommendations by the end of 2002.
Many councils have recognised the need for action plans with clear time scales. We must all take responsibility and ensure that councils implement those plans. The majority of plans have been targeted for implementation in time for the new round of children's services plans in April.
The report "For Scotland's children: Better integrated children's services" highlighted the need for better integrated working. Nowhere is that more important than in delivering good educational provision to young people whose family life has been disrupted and who are in local authority care.
Monitoring a child's progress is vital and I am aware of the problems with some local authority data systems. Information-sharing systems are being addressed as part of the modernising government agenda.
Some councils recognise the need to use specialist expertise. The Scottish Institute for Residential Child Care has helped to develop overall corporate child carer strategies and better training is being provided for foster carers to help them to support young people in their care. Scottish ministers have also played their part.
The "Learning with Care" report recommended that looked-after children—in particular those in residential care—should be provided with an educationally rich environment. We have already provided resources to help local authorities with that. On 22 October, Jack McConnell announced a special one-off grant of up to £10 million for this year based on £500 for each child looked after in a family setting and £2,500 for each child in a local authority or independent home.
Local authorities' applications covered everything from basic updating of textbooks to online learning to improve children's chances. All applications from local authorities for assistance have been met in full and all grants have been paid.
I was impressed by the innovative work that local authorities proposed to support looked-after children. The priority has been the immediate provision of books and equipment, in particular in residential settings, but some councils have considered the wider training needs of carers. The best proposals came from councils that aim to match provision to the needs identified in individual care plans.
The additional funding will make a difference. This morning, Jack McConnell and I met some young people who had been looked after. It was clear that some things make a big difference—help with homework, quiet study areas, good books and people showing that they care, for example. Staff and foster carers remembering to go to school carol concerts and interviews with teachers make a big difference. Such support can help to bring out the best in a young person. All councils will report to us, schools, parents and carers at the end of the academic year to let us know what the money has achieved. The reports will be published and all MSPs may want to take an interest in those reports through their local councils.
I am keen to maintain the momentum and improve the education of looked-after children. This year, we will organise and run three seminars in Scotland for social work services managers and education authority managers at various levels. The seminars will consider the report and the action taken by authorities. The emphasis is on promoting better collaboration and joint working to improve the educational experiences of looked-after children. With local authorities, we will develop appropriate national outcome indicators to measure educational provision and outcomes for looked-after children. We will prepare and disseminate nationally training materials for local authorities to use with their education and social work staff to promote collaborative working and to improve educational outcomes for looked-after children. The time scale for that project runs to December 2002, but the initial seminars will be held in April 2002.
We will include a report on progress in each council in the social work services inspectorate's annual report, which will be published by August 2002. The information will come from the inspectorate's visits to all 32 authorities between February and May 2002. We will ask authorities for a further report by the end of the year on the attainment of the three basic benchmarks. Those are that 100 per cent of looked-after children should be in full-time education, 100 per cent should have a care plan that adequately addresses educational needs and 100 per cent of schools should have a designated teacher to address the education of looked-after children.
The new format for children's services plans comes on-stream next year. The education of looked-after children figures prominently in the new set-up. Local authorities are working on action plans to realise the plans from 1 April. There is a clear timetable of events, which I want all of us to remember and to look out for locally. From April, local children's services plans will become available. At the end of the school year, councils will report on how they deployed the £10 million of additional resources to assist looked-after children.
I urge all elected members to play with us a full part in continuing to monitor local activity and close the gap for young people. Scotland's looked-after children deserve nothing less.
The minister will now take questions on the issues raised in the statement. I shall allow about 20 minutes for that, after which we will move to the next item of business. I shall allow the first few members to run on, provided that their points are made in the form of questions.
I thank the minister for making her statement available in advance.
We welcome the fact that the Executive is taking action to address a long-standing, well-known and shameful fact—that children's being in the care of a local authority disadvantages their educational attainment. I do not disagree with anything that the minister said about encouraging local authorities to carry out their statutory duties and to provide appropriate educational experiences for all children. It is wholly unacceptable that the experiences of vulnerable children vary considerably in different parts of the country and that those experiences are generally poor.
I note the minister's comment that none of the three minimal requirements that have been outlined should need new resources. Will she acknowledge that the fact that many local authorities are failing to meet those requirements reflects, in part, a lack of staff resources? I draw her attention to the "Learning with Care" report, page 41 of which states:
"The majority of social workers said that they did not have sufficient time to address fully the educational needs of looked after children."
That is significant, as most of the recommendations in the report, which were endorsed by the minister, rely on the availability of appropriately qualified staff to implement them. I ask the minister what she is going to do about the shortage of child care social workers and other relevant staff, as there is a difficulty in some areas with the availability of child psychologists to assist with assessment.
There are other issues—
Not too many.
No, I am just coming to an end.
There are other issues that the Executive will address this year—such as joint teacher-social work training—that also have resource implications and which will go a long way towards enacting what we all hope to achieve. There is also the issue of stability in placement, which was not mentioned. Often, transport is required to allow a child to remain at the same school although their living circumstances have changed. As well as ensuring that measures are taken to enhance the educational attainment of looked-after children, will the minister ensure that, where it is required, such support is provided so that it becomes an accepted part of good child care practice, firmly embedded in mainstream practice and available throughout the country?
I welcome the fact that Irene McGugan recognises that we are aiming to improve the quality of life of young people in care. I know that, like me, she has a long history of involvement in the issue and is genuinely committed to it.
I note the points that she has made on the staffing situation. The Scottish Executive has made available £77.5 million, over the next two years, through the changing children's services fund, to try to improve the integration of children's services and to provide those services on a better basis. Recruitment and retention were identified as an issue in the chief inspector of social work's annual report last year. That issue will require to be explored further with individual local authorities during the preparation of the next annual report. The Executive is taking steps to strengthen the social work profession by setting up the Scottish social services council. We will work closely with the council and others over the coming months to develop national and local strategies for the development of the social work and social care work force.
The crucial point that Irene McGugan made is that this is not just about what qualified social workers do in working with looked-after young people; it is about joining up all the services that exist to support young people and ensuring that the assessments are carried out correctly and that the appropriate resources are allocated. This morning, we received a powerful message from young people who told us how good it was when they had a teacher who understood that they required additional support and when a care staff member in their children's home assisted them, ensured that they did their homework and had good links with the school. Part of the solution concerns resourcing, which we have started to tackle, but there are also issues about joining up the services better.
I thank the minister for making her statement available in advance. I assure her that I was listening intently. I can say that the Conservatives entirely support the minister's statement and applaud her sincerity in trying to improve the position.
There have always been opportunities for educational improvement, but it is clear that the opportunities have been uneven across Scotland and that the educational outcomes have been profoundly disappointing. To borrow a phrase from one of my colleagues in another place, we must ensure that young people are put back on the up escalator to achievement.
There are 11,000 looked-after children from a wide variety of backgrounds and circumstances. It is a scandal that only 1 per cent of them go on to university and that 75 per cent leave school with no formal qualifications. Recent reports have explored the continuing failures of many local authorities. The papers that the minister laid before us today do not make encouraging reading. Only eight councils—a quarter of our local authorities—have met the three benchmarks that the minister talks of.
Will the review that the social work services inspectorate will hold include a role for Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education? Given the fact that, by the time we receive damning reports on schools from the HMIE, the people who were responsible for the failure are no longer in post, what actions will be taken against local authorities who continue to fail even after their plans are introduced in April? What plans will the minister bring to the chamber that we can support?
I welcome Brian Monteith's support for my statement. I am sure that he was listening intently and that he will do so when I answer his question.
I want to be absolutely clear that the local authorities that have provided us with reports have been brutally honest about the situation. I welcome that, because attempts to dress up the situation to make matters look better than they are are not helpful. The local authorities that recognise that more work needs to be done have said so clearly. They have responsibility for coming up with an action plan and taking the situation forward. This morning, I have made it clear that I expect the benchmarks that I spoke of to have been met by the end of 2002.
I recognise the difficulties facing various local authorities. Small authorities might have fewer children in residential care and larger ones might have more. Statistics can be skewed by the fact that the number of children in care varies. We do not want to castigate people to try to make them feel that they have failed. The corporate parents of young looked-after people must have the same aspirations for them that they would have for their own children—local authorities must take on that responsibility. We have identified a way of ensuring that there is joined-up working between social work departments, the other services and schools.
Educational attainment is, obviously, a priority for young people. This morning, I was struck by the aspirations of the young people whom I spoke to. Some of them are now in college and they want to achieve more. I want them to meet their aspirations. That will happen if all of us take a positive and constructive view and work together.
I welcome the thrust of the minister's statement, as we are dealing with a genuinely vulnerable group of children whose case needs to be highlighted and kept at the forefront of our thinking. Cathy Jamieson said that people's aspirations for looked-after children should be the same as their aspirations for their own children. In a real sense, looked-after children are our own children and we must not forget that.
I welcome the establishment of benchmark information and the setting of the three core targets. They are not complicated, bureaucratic, woolly or nebulous. They are achievable and can be measured positively and quickly.
The next stage will be more difficult. It will not be easy to ensure suddenly that all looked-after children get standard grades, highers and so on. How can we ensure that joint working is established by all local authorities? Today, we are talking mainly about social work, but the educational aspect is important as well. Do we accept that there will be resource implications? We kid ourselves if we imagine that there will not be. Does the minister agree that the kind of joint working that is being practised in new community schools is a good model?
I welcome that positive response from Ian Jenkins, particularly on specific, measurable, achievable targets. Perhaps it was my social work training that helped me to identify some of those.
Ian Jenkins makes points about joined-up working, which is vital. The additional resources that have been put into joined-up working through the changing children's services fund, which I mentioned, and into the roll-out of the new community schools programme will ensure that we are able to provide the resources to give children and young people who need it an education, where possible in their local communities. It will also ensure that the right resources and a package of support are built around children and young people.
Another interesting idea came this morning from young people who have been through the care system and who have experience of being consumers of teaching and social work services. They said that they have a role to play in training for social work and teaching. We want to pursue that idea.
This is about people putting looked-after children and vulnerable young people high on the agenda and saying, "They are a priority. We are going to do something." I do not pretend that that will be easy, but if we have a clear objective in mind, the local authorities will be in no doubt about what the priority is for the coming year.
Members must make their questions and answers shorter and snappier.
I am sure that the minister is aware of the "Looking After Children: Good Parenting, Good Outcomes" forms, which were developed by the social work services group from Department of Health documents to comply with the Children (Scotland) Act 1995. As the minister said, it is essential that all children have a valid care plan. Given that the forms should include that, will she review their use in the 32 local authorities in Scotland? In particular, will she review whether they achieve what they are supposed to achieve and engender the corporate parenting concept that was central to the 1995 act?
In an effort to give a shorter and snappier answer, I refer my colleague, who knows a considerable amount about the forms from his former life, to the information that has today been placed in the Scottish Parliament information centre. I hope that local authorities will consider carefully how they can best use the forms, remembering that they are not a bureaucratic exercise but are about the lives of children and young people.
What educational opportunities exist for children who are sent to secure units or even to prison? Is not it an absolute disgrace that, in 21st century Scotland—earlier this week, in fact—a 15-year-old girl was sent to Cornton Vale prison for breach of the peace? Does the minister agree that that is totally unacceptable in any civilised society?
Dennis Canavan is probably aware that I have some knowledge of the system of secure units. Obviously, I am concerned to ensure that young people who are in that form of provision get educational opportunities. I know that Jack McConnell, when he was Minister for Education, Europe and External Affairs, took that very seriously and initiated positive action on it.
I will comment briefly on the member's point about young people in the prison system. I was extremely concerned to hear about that case. I have asked for more information and will liaise with my colleagues in the justice department.
I spent many years working with vulnerable children in the schools sector. Does the minister agree that working with vulnerable children, such as looked-after children, and inter-agency working should be included in initial teacher training and in training for senior management in schools?
I take on board the point that Rhona Brankin has made and acknowledge that she has considerable personal experience of the matter. As I outlined, I want to create opportunities for joint working. That includes joint training. It is important that teachers have enough information about what it is like to live in the care system—quite often, they may not. Young people have identified that. There is clearly a place for considering improvement in the situation in future.
I welcome the minister's statement. Does she acknowledge the difference that access to respite and activity breaks can make to the personal and social development of looked-after children? Many other children take such activities for granted. Will she work with local authorities and the voluntary sector, including organisations such as Reality at Work Scotland in Lenzie in my constituency, to ensure that the most vulnerable children benefit most from such breaks?
Brian Fitzpatrick raises an important issue about rounded education for young people. I am sure that he is pleased to note the additional resources that have been made available, as I outlined, and that local authorities have the option to consider how to use those resources in the best interests of wider educational provision for children and young people. That is perhaps something that he would like to take up with his local authority.
I thank the minister for her statement. Does she accept that, from the information that we have, it seems that a bit of a postcode lottery is developing throughout Scotland, not just between local authorities, but within local authorities?
What steps are being taken to address the differences that exist between the urban and rural parts of local authority areas? What advice is being given to local authorities about how they can best involve young people positively and proactively in developing services?
I refer Karen Gillon to some of the points that I made previously, of which I know she is aware. I am conscious of the fact that young people who live in rural areas require access to the same services as those who live in urban areas. It can be difficult for young people who are brought into the care system in a rural area to get access to the resources that they need in the place in which they need them.
Karen Gillon mentioned consulting young people. I am aware that a number of young people who are looked after in the care system are interested in the debate and are following it today. It is vital that we continue to work with organisations such as Who Cares? Scotland and young people to hear what their experiences are. That informs us of best practice in every local authority in Scotland.
I applaud the minister's candour in addressing this hitherto neglected issue.
The minister spoke in her statement of local authorities establishing joint-working protocols. What cognisance has been taken of projects such as the Blackford Brae project—a partnership run by Barnardo's in co-operation with City of Edinburgh Council—which has been highly successful in returning children with emotional or behavioural difficulties to mainstream schools and helping them to achieve academic success? Although that project does not deal exclusively with looked-after children, it shows the expertise that exists in the voluntary sector in relation to vulnerable children. What can the Executive learn from the voluntary sector and what plans does the Executive have to involve the sector in the education of looked-after children?
I am aware of the particular project to which Kenny Gibson referred and, indeed, of a number of other projects across Scotland. I stress that the important issue is to get the right package of provision for looked-after young people. Sometimes that will be in the voluntary sector and sometimes it will be in local authority residential units.
Kenny Gibson asks what we, together with the voluntary sector, are doing. A number of cross-cutting issues that relate to returning young people to their local communities are addressed by the action plan on youth justice, which is to be published shortly. I assure Kenny Gibson that we will continue to examine the issues and that we will continue to work with all partners to achieve the best outcomes for young people.
What steps are being taken to tackle the problem of looked-after children going to different schools? That is a particular problem in rural areas, where emergency arrangements may involve moving children from one community to another. When more permanent arrangements are made, the children may be moved again. There is a lack of continuity in education and in teachers. Will the minister address that?
I would hope that that would be addressed primarily by local authorities in their planning arrangements. Obviously, we do not want a child's education to be disrupted, but there can sometimes be good reasons why a young person requires to be moved for a time. In general, I want us to give young people an opportunity for consistent education and I would expect that to be addressed in plans.
If Rhoda Grant—or any other member—wants to raise any issues about particular areas with me, I will be happy to look into them.