Education outcomes for Scotland's looked after children, 2011/12

Education outcomes for Scotland's looked after children, 2011/12

This publication presents information on the educational outcomes of the 388 young people who were looked after continuously for at least a year and left school during the academic year 2011/12. These looked after children represent less than one per cent of the 50,665 young people who left school during 2011/12. Each figure in the illustration below represents 528 young people.

In the academic year 2011/12:

Young people who are looked after by local authorities tend to leave school at younger ages than other young people. Partly because of this, looked after young people tend to have lower levels of educational qualification and are less likely to go on to positive destinations after school than young people who are not looked after, although there have been improvements over the last three years.

Map 1: Three-year average tariff scores of looked after children, by local authority, 2009/10 to 2011/12

The numbers of looked after children leaving school each year at a local authority level are small (on average around 15 children per local authority). Map 1, which combines three years of data, shows generally higher levels of attainment in the East of Scotland. Attainment among looked after school leavers is highest in Scottish Borders, Clackmannanshire and Shetland Islands (who have small numbers of children) and lowest in North Lanarkshire and East Ayrshire. Data for Orkney have not been included as the number of children is too small to be robust

Data on attendance and exclusions from school is now only available every second year and will next be available for the 2012/13 publication which be published in June 2014. See background note 1.6 for more information on this.

As there are now four years of individual level data available, this publication also looks at longer term patterns of children being looked after from April 2008 to July 2012. These data show that the majority of children who ceased being looked after during this period remained in one placement for the entire length of time they were looked after.