Looked after children: education outcomes 2015-2016

Introduction

Local authorities have a responsibility to provide support to a group of vulnerable young people, known as 'looked after children'. A young person may become looked after for a number of reasons, including neglect, abuse, complex disabilities which require specialist care, or involvement in the youth justice system.

This publication links school and social work data to present information on the attainment of looked after young people and the post-school destinations of looked after young people who leave school. The school attendance and exclusion rates of all looked after children are only included every other year, and will next appear in 2016/17.

This publication also includes experimental statistics on teacher judgement of looked after young people, on which data was published for the wider school population in December 2016.

Who are counted in these figures?

This first two chapters of this publication give information on the education outcomes and destinations of 468 young people who were looked after from August 2015 to July 2016 and who left school during 2015/16. These looked after children represent less than one per cent of the 52,305 2015/16 school leavers. The third chapter focuses on education outcomes and destinations of 462 young people who were looked after for only part of the year.

The final two sections focus on the achievement of Curriculum for Excellence levels across four year groups - this is a new section and is currently designated as experimental statistics.