Care Experienced Children and Young People Fund: operational guidance 2023 to 2024

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.

Attainment Advisors from Education Scotland will engage with local authorities to provide professional advice and guidance, on a local and regional basis, to support planning, implementation and reporting, taking account of national guidance.

Examples of this include Attainment Advisors:

• working with Chief Social Work officer and Director of Education to support joint planning and development of collaborative approaches to the use of the Care Experienced Children and Young People fund.
• providing advice and support to local Care Experienced Children and Young People officers on planning and reporting on Care Experienced Children and Young People Fund initiatives and the use of impact evaluation data and evidence to identify successful approaches and areas for improvement.
• supporting review of local authority SAC self-evaluation framework and approaches and providing advice on how this could be expanded to include work related to the Care Experienced Children and Young People Fund.
• working with local Care Experienced Children and Young People officers to support enhanced tracking and monitoring of attainment for Care Experienced Children and Young People and collaborative working with a variety of local authority partners.

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 National Improvement Hub 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 or corporate parenting contains an extensive suite of links and resources with specific relevance to this funding stream.

Scottish Attainment Challenge – Self-evaluation resource designed to assist schools and others bring about further improvement at this time of recovery.

A reflective tool for educators can be found at Getting It Right For All Learners during Covid: a reflective tool for educators working together across Scotland | Self-evaluation | National Improvement Hub (education.gov.scot).

NHS Education for Scotland (NES) lead on the National Trauma Training Programme and have developed a suite of universally accessible and free resources to support awareness raising and training. The latest addition to these resources is a very helpful training module for people who work with and care for children and young people. This module is open to anyone and is available on the NES learning platform, Turas Learn. Anyone can register on Turas using an e-mail address (personal or company) and you will be able to access this module and other learning resources.

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.

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 building 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.

Scottish Government, February 2024