Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:05 pm on 4 March 2020.
Thank you to everyone taking part in this debate. I think it's been very interesting so far, and I appreciate that perhaps the main thrust of it is about reducing the numbers of children in care in a safe way, but in discussing life chances, which I think is point 2 of our motion, I think we do need to look at the relationship between looked-after children and the education system in which they find themselves and about how the needs of those children are met. It's not a stand-alone issue, of course. The ability of any child to get anything from the formal education system to improve their life chances of course, as Caroline Jones said, can be compromised by a host of childhood experiences, but it is for the system to respond to the needs of the children and, actually, the role played by other important people in that child's life, rather than the other way around.
So, the first question I want to ask is: how confident are we of how well foster carers are supported and how well they are trained and encouraged to find out the best ways to help the child that's in their care get the most out of their education? This has already been mentioned, but our children's committee did some very hard-hitting work a few years ago on the lack of effective post-adoption support for new parents, but I think the same is going to be true for those long-term foster placements—not the shorter ones, but the longer term foster carers, including kinship carers who, of course, are going through their own mixture of very complicated emotions relating to their own family. So I just want to make the point that point 4(d) of our motion is not just about a child's safety and, perhaps, their behaviour, it's about recognising that school can be one more place for a looked-after child to feel lost or misunderstood, unsupported, miserable and out of place, even in those schools that are the most switched on to the extra needs of looked-after children. So, can we just be sure and ask ourselves that question as to whether foster carers have all the tools they need to fight a child's corner with that child's school? As we've heard already, educational outcomes for looked-after children are poorer than for their peers. I'm not going to rehearse that again.
We should of course be pleased that 23 per cent of looked-after children are now achieving their five good GCSEs. That's considerably up in the last eight years, but we still have 23 per cent of those children who leave with no qualifications at all. How has that happened? What has gone so right and simultaneously so wrong, because behind those figures are some others that should worry us. We've already heard that 10.9 per cent of looked-after children—that's a very small proportion—are reaching that point to be reasonably expected of a 16-year-old. So I'm wondering will we now see a drop in that range of—[Interruption.] Yes, by all means.