The educational progress of looked after children in England Technical Report 1: Secondary school progress and attainment

The policy aim underlying this research was to improve the relatively poor educational outcomes of looked after children. The research exploited the linking of national data about the educational achievement of all children from the National Pupil Database (NPD) with local authority data on Children Looked After (CLA) and their experiences of care. This linkage provided a unique opportunity to inform future policy and practice by identifying factors that might account for the relatively poor GCSE attainments of CLA, and factors associated with substantive variations in those outcomes. This quantitative analysis, relating to GCSE attainment and progress during the secondary phase of education, compared the GCSE outcomes of CLA and other children to address three research questions: 1. What does variability in the GCSE attainments of children in care tell us about the influence of schools and local authorities on their secondary education? 2. What differences are there between children in care and other pupils in the associations between individual characteristics, such as gender, ethnicity, SEN and socio-economic status, and educational outcomes? 3. Are there contextual factors at the school and local authority levels that are associated with differences in outcomes specifically for children in care? We proceed by describing the available data, presenting a descriptive analysis of it, presenting a multilevel (contextual value added) analysis of GCSE results, and finally summarising the conclusions