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

Accountability

Local authorities are responsible for:

• Ensuring that care experienced children and young people’s voices are heard and embedded in decision making.
• Preparing plans for the Care Experienced Children and Young People Fund, which should outline clear outcomes to be achieved and how progress towards these will be measured and monitored.
• Providing assistance to schools and partners by:
  • supporting schools, social care services and other partners to raise awareness of the needs of care experienced children and young people through coaching, professional learning, trauma awareness and supporting access to tracking and monitoring and data analysis tools.
  • providing professional learning around planning (data, outcomes & measures), interventions & approaches.
  • offering practical support, where required, in terms of financial management, access to data, tracking and monitoring tools and HR.
• Ongoing, active monitoring of plans in place for Care Experienced Children and Young People Fund spending, supporting and challenging key stakeholders and/or partners; and adjusting plans where necessary.
• Reporting on progress towards identified stretch aims.
• Reporting on the effective investment of ASF and linking Care Experienced Children and Young People Fund in to wider plans.
• Collaborating with a range of services across the local authority and in local communities to secure additional contributions to the mission of the Scottish Attainment Challenge.

Stretch Aims

Specific requirements for setting local stretch aims are set out in The Framework for Recovery and Accelerating Progress.

In summary, local stretch aims should be both ambitious and achievable within local contexts. The process of setting local stretch aims should be done in collaboration with stakeholders, taking account of their school and service plans to tackle the poverty-related attainment gap. There should be two-way engagement between local authorities and schools when planning for and setting stretch aims.

There is a need to consider equalities when identifying root causes of attainment gaps – data about poverty and the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation should be looked at in conjunction with other key characteristics including care experience.

In order to ensure some national consistency a “core plus” model has been developed. The “core” is for aims measurable by a sub-set of the National Improvement Framework (NIF) key measures and an aim for improvement in pupils’ health and wellbeing. These form a minimum expectation for all local authorities to set out aims for raising attainment for all and for improving health and wellbeing and tackling the poverty-related attainment gap.

At a minimum these should include (core) stretch aims for both overall progress and for reducing the poverty-related gaps in:

a) achievement of Curriculum for Excellence Levels (literacy combined and numeracy combined);

b) the proportion of school leavers attaining 1 or more pass at SCQF level 5 based on the “Summary Statistics for Attainment and Initial Leaver Destinations” publication;

c) the proportion of school leavers attaining 1 or more pass at SCQF level 6 based on the “Summary Statistics for Attainment and Initial Leaver Destinations” publication;

d) the proportion of 16-19 olds participating in education, employment or training based on the Annual Participation Measure produced by Skills Development Scotland; and

e) a locally identified aim for health and wellbeing, to be measured using local datasets.

The “plus” enables local authorities to identify further aims, measurable by either local or national data, in particular considering wider achievement, readiness to learn, or the cost of the school day. Underpinning these should be locally identified indicators of progress.

Each identified stretch aim should clearly articulate overall aims for raising attainment and improving health and wellbeing, and for tackling the poverty-related attainment gap in 2025/26. The Framework for Recovery and Accelerating Progress includes exemplification of such local stretch aims.

The setting and ambition of these aims should be achieved by local authorities as a result of robust evidence-informed self-evaluation, supported and challenged through professional dialogue with Education Scotland.

These plans and stretch aims should be developed in line with the existing academic planning cycle and be agreed by the end of September each year, if not before.